> Apple controls distribution. That is not 3rd party development
Uh... what you just described is how third-party development works in the game industry, for example PS2, XBox, iPod games.
It sounds like Jobs is saying that "iPhone apps" will be done the same way as "iPod apps", rather than the same way as Mac apps. I'm not sure why this would surprise anyone. The iPhone is more iPod than Mac, in spite of OS X.
> At $500+ per unit and a goal of 1% of the phone market, it won't really make itself into THE platform to write apps for, now will it? > Its not going to replace the Blackberry or even the Danger HiptopIII.
Until iPhone nano in the tiniest phone form factor.
This iPhone is just to get started. See the original iPod.
But the reason that iPhone's OS is called "OS X" is
a) to communicate to users that the user experience is on par with Mac OS X b) to show actual heritage
Same as every other OS naming.
Why else does NetBSD have BSD in its name? Because a team of academics carefully scrutinized its architecture, kernel, or API and pronounced it to be BSD? No.
I think the main point is that EVERYTHING gets onto the iPhone through iTunes, just like with today's iPods.
You can lose your iPod and get a new one and plug it into your iTunes and it is almost like nothing happened. Can you imagine if people had to back up their iPods? It is the same with iPhone. There will be a button in iTunes to wipe your iPhone and restore to factory. Should this feature stop and go "hey, you didn't load any software on your phone did you?"
I also think it's hilarious to talk about a hardware Web browser with both cell and Wi-Fi networking and support for all of the Web standards you'd expect as being a "closed system" ha ha. If your Web app runs in Firefox you have probably already made a bunch of iPhone software.
> The iPhone display is unique for its size and its total pixel count, not its dpi (which is rather ordinary in fact).
No, you're wrong, and about 2-3 years behind the curve. It is not the display HARDWARE, but rather its SOFTWARE (display layer) that is special.
The iPhone display is unique in that each single pixel of the display (hardware pixel count) is NOT matched to a single pixel of the user interface (software pixel count). Every other screen on the planet is 1:1 pixel ratio aka zero pixel scaling aka so-called "72 dpi".
If your smart phone has a 320x480 pixel display, then inside of that you will see a 320x480 pixel user interface. A button that is 40x20 pixels in your interface will be stored somewhere in the phone as a 40x20 pixel graphic. The grid of pixels is turned on and off to create the illusion of movement or animation, one single pixel at a time. This is a particular kind of sleight-of-hand, but it is not what the iPhone or Mac OS X Leopard (and Tiger in a particular test mode) do with their screens.
The iPhone's actual screen is a huge "soft-screen", much larger than 320x480, that you can think of as being covered up and only viewable through a 3.5 inch diagonal window which is the hardware screen. Imagine an 8.5x11 piece of paper with a 3.5 inch diagonal magnifying glass. As you drag a large Web page around on the iPhone, you are simply re-orienting it behind the hardware screen so that you can see another part of the soft-screen, which contains more of the Web page. You have no way of knowing how big a particular image within that Web page is in pixels, because you are not likely to be looking at it at 1:1 pixel ratio like in every other Web browser, but rather your "soft-screen" is scaled up or down to match your last actions, your last requirements, the last Web page you visited.
Every image you see on the iPhone is created in real-time for you using the actual pixel or vector image data as source only. You aren't just shown a 200x300 image using 200x300 pixels, but rather at whatever size is appropriate. Pinch your fingers and you'll change it.
What's happening in screens now is that once you go above 150 dpi, you are better to start to use printing math and printing methodologies to create images. For the history of computer screens, their much lower pixel count than print has enabled operating systems to be lazy but now that we are going above 150 dpi that is over. At that point the display device has to start scaling to be flexible enough.
A key issue with all of this is, for example, if your operating system's user interface icons are stored at 128x128 and you try to display a Desktop on a 30 foot display with 150 dpi you are going to see them looking like a fly on the wall. For this reason, in Tiger, Mac OS X icons were increased to 512 pixels square from 128 pixels square so that they can shown without jaggies on very large screens or high pixel counts. Apple is also creating interface elements on the fly rather than storing bitmaps... basically skinning vectors like Adobe Fireworks.
> WebKit itself isn't required either. Widgets use existing Web technology and they could be run without any existing OS X software at all.
This is sort of true. However the tag that is essential to Widgets was created by Apple, within WebKit, and then was adopted by Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko in a way that is ready for standardization. So Apple could also use Gecko instead of WebKit, but not anything else. Since WebKit is built from the beginning to be smaller and faster than Gecko it seems like WebKit would be a better choice for iPhone. Also, there is a browser for Symbian/ARM called "S60" which is WebKit based, so WebKit already was running on ARM before iPhone.
You saw the future in the iPhone introduction but just didn't recognize it.
One of the main advertised and demonstrated features is that everything on the screen can scale up or down at any time. The actual software "screen" is much, much larger than 3.5 inches diagonally and 320x480 pixels. The hardware screen acts like a fixed window that you are looking through to see an image that is projected on the other side at various magnifications. So when you pan around a Web page with your fingers, the reason this works so smoothly is because at some level you really are moving the full Web page around so you can see parts of it through the window. Each single pixel of the screen on the iPhone is not matched to a single pixel of the image that's being displayed, as is the case with every other screen in the world. This will also be true of Leopard Macs.
Also, if you follow OS X development, in version 10.4 Tiger Apple included a new feature called "resolution-independent UI" which was turned off by default, but which developers could turn on to test their apps as they build them so that by the time 10.5 Leopard ships, the idea is that all Mac apps will be able to work seamlessly whether they are shown on a 30 inch display or a 30 foot display or a 3 inch display. If you are familiar with computer interface design this is also a hot topic because the traditional barriers between "screen" and "print" break down when you go above 150 dpi, which is about the resolution of a drug store photographic print, or today's most-dense LCD screens.
So, there are quite a few people who watch the iPhone demo and go "oh, there's Leopard's CoreGraphics with its resolution-independent UI" because it is an OS X feature, not an iPhone feature, although the iPhone obviously runs OS X.
> Yeah, it's not as if Linux distributions can be made to work on x86, x86-64, PPC, PPC64, 68k, SPARC, S/390, > S/390-64 (a/k/a z/Architecture), SuperH, ARM, IA-64, MIPS, etc..:-)
Isn't that more like saying "UNIX is portable" rather than saying "OS X is portable"? There are a lot of Linuxes running on a lot of platforms and a lot of UNIXes but I haven't seen a Linux that runs identically on PPC and Intel so much so that you can't tell them apart, the way Mac OS X does... everything is identical, so much so that Steve Jobs used to contrast them by showing a PPC Desktop and then transition to the next slide it is the Intel Desktop and it is identical. And they are doing this with an application platform that is over 10,000 commercial apps, with many non-technical users, and in the shadow of Microsoft's felonies.
> Don't forget that the abbreviation is parsed as (Mac OS) [version] Ten. Saying "OS Ten" is IMO merely due to the American predilection > towards brevity.
So your problem is the missing "Phone " before the name of the iPhone's operating system.
The reason for this is that the "OS X" on the iPhone is actually the One True OS X. It's the OS X for everybody. It's the OS X that's going to be "THE" OS X in a short while, and it will be a great advertisement for the Mac, which has become the development platform for iPods and iPhones... you make movies, music, Web apps on a Mac, but most of your friends just watch them or use them or talk about them on their iPhones.
iPhone is the same exact thing as Mac, only one step easier. Get it? It is hard for Slashdot to imagine why such a thing would even be necessary.
Look at the numbers on phones versus PC's... it is already over.
> a big deal out of it running OSX. That creates certain expectations
> For example: OSX runs 3rd party applications.
I think you managed to hit on the "OS X expectation" that was the very last on Steve Jobs' list.
I imagine he wants you to expect your iPhone to be reliable, have great networking, power management, rich graphics, great type, animated/scaling interface, ease of use, "just work", support standards, have great audio/video multimedia, be on the cutting edge of technology, be user-centric, stay "out of your way", be ruthlessly refined.
Although iPhone looks like it will be mainly for Web apps, it is always on the Web and has a full-featured "Web 2.0" browser. What kind of third-party app is it that you think you want to run on your iPhone that can't be done as a Web application?
> Why would Apple write a whole new high level audio and video API, when the existing software they are porting is > written to use Quicktime? It just makes no sense.
Because rather than a general purpose CPU upon which you can run arbitrary codecs, iPhone has MPEG-4 decoder hardware, same as iPod.
MPEG-4 is ISO QuickTime, but so far you just have AAC audio movies, and AAC/H.264 audio/video movies, like what you get at iTunes Store (exactly like). A movie with Flash in it or Java can't be saved as MPEG-4 yet. The multitude of tracks that QuickTime can support and all the authoring features may not be needed at this time in the iPhone.
> Jobs calling it "OS X" is only an attempt to piggyback on the perceived superiority of that platform.
If it has the same software architecture and features, it is hardly piggybacking... it's walking on its own feet. If it comes from parents with a good reputation then it will benefit from that reputation.
> It is likely that they are leveraging the OS X code base but that is another matter.
If they are, then the name should not only reflect the heritage but announce it proudly so that EVERYBODY KNOWS THERE IS A PHONE WITH OS X RELIABILITY AND FEATURES. Because that's what people want.
It's a little thing called communication for crying out loud.
> Quicktime and PDFKit are required to run Safari, so it should be part of the package. Besides, the whole iPod enchilada > is based on Quicktime, so I can't see how you figure it is not included.
Nooooooooo.
The iTunes enchilada is based on QuickTime.
The iPod is MPEG-4 decoding hardware and so is the iPhone. There is no general purpose CPU upon which you can run arbitrary codecs. Instead you have ISO MPEG-4, H.264 and AAC, and that's all you get. Also right now QuickTime is being rebuilt as MPEG-4 after ISO standardization so you would expect to see QuickTime features show up later in iPhone as further MPEG-4 features. If you have to leave stuff out, you leave out the non-standard playback codecs and the authoring codecs, and if you have limited CPU, you do the MPEG decoding in hardware.
There is definitely no Flash in iPhone right now, this is verified by Jobs post-Keynote (also no Java). Flash is already in QuickTime for many years so that means there is no QuickTime in iPhone. Since Flash is not ISO MPEG-4 it can't be decoded by hardware and ARM 1GHz is not enough to run YouTube. Flash on phones lacks video so it is not just Apple.
Finally, iPhone is a Webkit-based browser, just like Safari, but it is not in fact, Safari. How Jobs could have explained this to the layman in any better way than saying "it's Safari" I don't know, but the technically accurate way to say it is "it's Webkit". If iPhone lacks QuickTime then its browser won't require it. It is likely that iPhone's Web browser completely lacks plug-ins because they are the worst tire fire in Web development. A proper way to play MPEG-4 audio and video inline in the browser would be nice but they don't have to provide that... clicking a link to an MPEG-4 media could just play it in the iPhone's iPod.
When they say "VGA" in a phone, I thought they meant 320x480, which is half a VGA. That's what the iPhone has.
Jobs clearly said it's the highest res display Apple has ever shipped, at 160 ppi. The next best is about 130 ppi on a MacBook. Apple specifically stopped going to higher pixel densities until after Leopard and its resolution independent UI, which is obviously in the iPhone.
> except that Microsoft never pretended that they were running the "full desktop OS"
Microsoft conflates the separate versions of Windows CONSTANTLY. During the anti-trust trial in the 1990's it came out that in all of their head-to-head marketing materials (e.g. features of "Windows" vs features of "Linux") they used DOS/Windows features where it was advantageous to them, NT/Windows features when advantageous, and even CE/Windows when it was advantageous (e.g. low-power draw or instant-on). Each of these three Windows systems had an entirely different codebase at the time, and even ran on very different hardware. The only relation was all made by Microsoft and branded Windows.
In the iPhone, Apple is clearly using the actual full-scale desktop stuff, for example WebKit. You should be able to load the same Web page in iPhone and in Safari on the Mac and notice things like CSS measurements being exactly the same, or you could find the same rendering bug from WebKit in both places. That is also true of PDF rendering, driver I/O, networking, and all kinds of other stuff. At some point there will be a security advisory that affects only "OS X" and you will see it on both the Mac and iPhone because the same code is there.
It's the same Google Maps from the browser but it is running in a Widget essentially, and gets a few special privileges that make for a better user experience.
The Google CEO is there more to show Google's enthusiasm for this kind of device, which is the client to Google's "cloud" servers in their way of thinking. He joined the Apple board right after the iPhone started being developed. You CAN run Google from your PC, but you're not supposed to. You're supposed to carry it with you on your person. If Apple didn't build this, maybe Google would have had to, but they are glad they didn't. That's what that ApplGoog comment was about and him saying that companies should do what they're best at. I think the Google CEO and probably founders also and many others inside Google see the iPhone as the beginning of the end of their beta testing.
What he's saying is that the "front-end" on both the Mac and iPhone is the SAME.
On the Mac, you have windows, icons, menus, mouse, and on the iPhone, a multi-touch screen, but in both cases you have PDF-based, resolution-independent, 3D animated graphics that meet certain high-end standards with regards to masking and compositing and transitions.
Imagine that instead of an iPhone, Apple introduced a new Mac notebook with an extra little iPhone-like touch screen on the outside of the case, so that when the notebook was closed, you could access contacts or listen to music without running the whole system. We would not be surprised if the UI still looked the same on the touch screen part because it looks like what OS X would "want" to offer you as an interface if you didn't have room for a mouse and such. An experienced Mac users can see the same stuff going on in the iPhone interface that they're used to from Mac OS X. It is smooth and 3D and beveled and animated and things scale up or down or fade in and out instead of just appearing or disappearing. There is a visual language there that Apple is speaking in both devices.
> What the iPhones has is an entirely new operating system also known as OS X that is likely related to Mac OS X but distinct.
Wow you are actually arguing that porting a software product to another platform changes it into an entirely different software product. That is usually the kind of thinking that is done when one's head is up one's ass. Your post is full of straw men. The Mac OS X development tools have nothing to do with the iPhone or with its OS X.
When was the last time you saw "an entirely new operating system"? The best candidate would be Mac OS X from 2001 but even there you have a very strong Mac and Next and UNIX heritage. Before that maybe Linux in 1992 but that is also very much descended from UNIX. The idea that the iPhone would use an entirely distinct and unique resolution-independent PDF-based UI from the Mac is bizarre compared to the idea that they would use the same one. They not only want the same kind of flashy, smart, motion UI in the iPhone as in the Mac, but they are proud of the Mac... they want to brag that they will give you the same experience in iPhone. They want to point out the OS X reputation for being high-quality and highly-desired.
No, you cannot run Mac apps on the iPhone, due to the lack of a Mac. Note that it says "OS X" on the iPhone, not "Mac OS X".
The resolution independent UI stuff in iPhone is hot in Mac development right now. It was in Tiger in a test version and the real version is a big feature of Leopard.
Instead of storing a bitmap button they are skinning vectors, like Fireworks or Painter. The OS generates pixels on the fly as required by the metrics. How third-party developers are going to work with this is still being worked out on the Mac, never mind on the iPhone.
That's what "OS X" means because that is its reputation.
If you tell me that my bank machine is running "Windows", I won't want to use it because I will feel that it will be untrustworthy, broken, maliciously designed when it's designed at all, incompatible, error-prone, insecure, disrespectful of my privacy and other rights, and not worth my time or money to even be involved in.
That's what saying something is running "Windows" means.
It's about reputation.
In addition to that, the iPhone OS X is actually made from the same stuff as Mac OS X. Same libraries and code and architectures. But that could also be true if it was called "iPhone OS"... the reason to actually brand it "OS X" is for Apple to promise their future iPhone customers that the iPhone will live up to the Mac OS X reputation at the operating system level. It won't be crashy, it won't be buggy, it will perform for you to the OS X standard.
If Apple wasn't willing to stand on OS X's reputation that would be the drag. They didn't port Mac OS 9 to the original iPod... just the font.
The iPhone has a full Web browser that can run the most sophisticated and demanding Web application, including parts of HTML5.
It runs Amazon.com, you know? It runs NYTimes.com. There is no lack of software for it already and it's not out yet.
One thing that many programmers are going to have to adjust to over the next 20 years is the idea that no, you're not going to get to run your code with privileges on any old box. Those days are so gone. The number of Mac users I know who don't know how to install applications on their system... it is outrageous. It is just drag-and-drop most of the time but they don't want to know because so much comes in the box already and Apple even updates it for you. They would rather use a half-assed Web app that requires NO MAINTENANCE than install a free app that is twice as good, and they are right a lot of the time.
Why would an iPhone user want to install an application on there when they are hooked onto the Web 24/7 with a real Web browser with all the trimmings including MPEG-4 media? So they can update that application later? So they can find out later it's recording their phone calls? So they can manage license keys, or whether or not the app can be run on both their iPhones or just one?
This device is even more personal than a personal computer. What is so wrong with staying in the Web sandbox? Put your executable code on a Web server and put an ISO front-end on it and you are iPhone-ready. You can test your interface in Safari on a Mac or in the WebKit nightly builds if you like but if it works in Firefox you are already there.
You don't even have to count pixels to make sure the Web interface you make is smaller than 320 or 480 pixels because the iPhone scales stuff. Just make a smaller-size Web page and you are done.
> Imagine a desktop environment which is free (XCode) has a basic switch to produce device code. That would be the true revolution.
There's nothing to say this isn't coming. All that has been said is that software is going to get onto the iPhone via iTunes, the same way that everything else gets on there.
> Smartphones and PDAs are so frustrating, all that cool hardware and so little access to it.
iPhone has an always-on Cell/Wi-Fi Web connection with a desktop-class Web browser that supports HTML 4.01, DOM Level 1, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.5, PNG 1.0, JPEG 1.0, and MPEG-4 audio/video, all with a tactile and a resolution-independent display with fast graphics.
In addition, when the phone charges, it's hooked into iTunes, where the user can add audio/video content, PDF books, games and other software.
How is that "locked down"?
Do you really need to do more than that on someone's Phone?
It is so much easier for them to port their existing, working, highly-capable, first-class operating system to the iPhone than it is to build something from scratch on the iPhone that would then appear to be ported from their existing operating system.
From what we understand, the iPhone has a 1 GHz ARM CPU in it, and of course at least 4 GB of "disk" storage. How is that not good enough for UNIX? There is also likely a hardware MPEG-4 decoder for the audio/video playback. For the graphics, it is only 320x480, which is exactly half of a VGA display... very small number of pixels, and the iPhone is obviously doing the same resolution-independent tricks that Leopard does (and Tiger does in a test version if you know how to turn it on) so why build that again?
Also, the whole philosophy of Cocoa is that you make a huge framework and then build on it, so they are not going to leave their frameworks behind on the Mac as they move to a new kind of device.
Slashdot Mirror
> Apple controls distribution. That is not 3rd party development
... what you just described is how third-party development works in the game industry, for example PS2, XBox, iPod games.
Uh
It sounds like Jobs is saying that "iPhone apps" will be done the same way as "iPod apps", rather than the same way as Mac apps. I'm not sure why this would surprise anyone. The iPhone is more iPod than Mac, in spite of OS X.
> At $500+ per unit and a goal of 1% of the phone market, it won't really make itself into THE platform to write apps for, now will it?
> Its not going to replace the Blackberry or even the Danger HiptopIII.
Until iPhone nano in the tiniest phone form factor.
This iPhone is just to get started. See the original iPod.
But the reason that iPhone's OS is called "OS X" is
a) to communicate to users that the user experience is on par with Mac OS X
b) to show actual heritage
Same as every other OS naming.
Why else does NetBSD have BSD in its name? Because a team of academics carefully scrutinized its architecture, kernel, or API and pronounced it to be BSD? No.
>> The Darwin / Apple Public Source licensing agreement ... which doesn't apply to Apple.
> Wait, are we talking about the same Apple that just told Cisco to fuck off ?
Anyone would after seeing what Cisco did. It is embarrassing. Putting an "iPhone" sticker on an existing product? That is sad.
I think the main point is that EVERYTHING gets onto the iPhone through iTunes, just like with today's iPods.
You can lose your iPod and get a new one and plug it into your iTunes and it is almost like nothing happened. Can you imagine if people had to back up their iPods? It is the same with iPhone. There will be a button in iTunes to wipe your iPhone and restore to factory. Should this feature stop and go "hey, you didn't load any software on your phone did you?"
I also think it's hilarious to talk about a hardware Web browser with both cell and Wi-Fi networking and support for all of the Web standards you'd expect as being a "closed system" ha ha. If your Web app runs in Firefox you have probably already made a bunch of iPhone software.
> The iPhone display is unique for its size and its total pixel count, not its dpi (which is rather ordinary in fact).
... basically skinning vectors like Adobe Fireworks.
No, you're wrong, and about 2-3 years behind the curve. It is not the display HARDWARE, but rather its SOFTWARE (display layer) that is special.
The iPhone display is unique in that each single pixel of the display (hardware pixel count) is NOT matched to a single pixel of the user interface (software pixel count). Every other screen on the planet is 1:1 pixel ratio aka zero pixel scaling aka so-called "72 dpi".
If your smart phone has a 320x480 pixel display, then inside of that you will see a 320x480 pixel user interface. A button that is 40x20 pixels in your interface will be stored somewhere in the phone as a 40x20 pixel graphic. The grid of pixels is turned on and off to create the illusion of movement or animation, one single pixel at a time. This is a particular kind of sleight-of-hand, but it is not what the iPhone or Mac OS X Leopard (and Tiger in a particular test mode) do with their screens.
The iPhone's actual screen is a huge "soft-screen", much larger than 320x480, that you can think of as being covered up and only viewable through a 3.5 inch diagonal window which is the hardware screen. Imagine an 8.5x11 piece of paper with a 3.5 inch diagonal magnifying glass. As you drag a large Web page around on the iPhone, you are simply re-orienting it behind the hardware screen so that you can see another part of the soft-screen, which contains more of the Web page. You have no way of knowing how big a particular image within that Web page is in pixels, because you are not likely to be looking at it at 1:1 pixel ratio like in every other Web browser, but rather your "soft-screen" is scaled up or down to match your last actions, your last requirements, the last Web page you visited.
Every image you see on the iPhone is created in real-time for you using the actual pixel or vector image data as source only. You aren't just shown a 200x300 image using 200x300 pixels, but rather at whatever size is appropriate. Pinch your fingers and you'll change it.
What's happening in screens now is that once you go above 150 dpi, you are better to start to use printing math and printing methodologies to create images. For the history of computer screens, their much lower pixel count than print has enabled operating systems to be lazy but now that we are going above 150 dpi that is over. At that point the display device has to start scaling to be flexible enough.
A key issue with all of this is, for example, if your operating system's user interface icons are stored at 128x128 and you try to display a Desktop on a 30 foot display with 150 dpi you are going to see them looking like a fly on the wall. For this reason, in Tiger, Mac OS X icons were increased to 512 pixels square from 128 pixels square so that they can shown without jaggies on very large screens or high pixel counts. Apple is also creating interface elements on the fly rather than storing bitmaps
> WebKit itself isn't required either. Widgets use existing Web technology and they could be run without any existing OS X software at all.
This is sort of true. However the tag that is essential to Widgets was created by Apple, within WebKit, and then was adopted by Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko in a way that is ready for standardization. So Apple could also use Gecko instead of WebKit, but not anything else. Since WebKit is built from the beginning to be smaller and faster than Gecko it seems like WebKit would be a better choice for iPhone. Also, there is a browser for Symbian/ARM called "S60" which is WebKit based, so WebKit already was running on ARM before iPhone.
You saw the future in the iPhone introduction but just didn't recognize it.
One of the main advertised and demonstrated features is that everything on the screen can scale up or down at any time. The actual software "screen" is much, much larger than 3.5 inches diagonally and 320x480 pixels. The hardware screen acts like a fixed window that you are looking through to see an image that is projected on the other side at various magnifications. So when you pan around a Web page with your fingers, the reason this works so smoothly is because at some level you really are moving the full Web page around so you can see parts of it through the window. Each single pixel of the screen on the iPhone is not matched to a single pixel of the image that's being displayed, as is the case with every other screen in the world. This will also be true of Leopard Macs.
Also, if you follow OS X development, in version 10.4 Tiger Apple included a new feature called "resolution-independent UI" which was turned off by default, but which developers could turn on to test their apps as they build them so that by the time 10.5 Leopard ships, the idea is that all Mac apps will be able to work seamlessly whether they are shown on a 30 inch display or a 30 foot display or a 3 inch display. If you are familiar with computer interface design this is also a hot topic because the traditional barriers between "screen" and "print" break down when you go above 150 dpi, which is about the resolution of a drug store photographic print, or today's most-dense LCD screens.
So, there are quite a few people who watch the iPhone demo and go "oh, there's Leopard's CoreGraphics with its resolution-independent UI" because it is an OS X feature, not an iPhone feature, although the iPhone obviously runs OS X.
> Yeah, it's not as if Linux distributions can be made to work on x86, x86-64, PPC, PPC64, 68k, SPARC, S/390, :-)
... everything is identical, so much so that Steve Jobs used to contrast them by showing a PPC Desktop and then transition to the next slide it is the Intel Desktop and it is identical. And they are doing this with an application platform that is over 10,000 commercial apps, with many non-technical users, and in the shadow of Microsoft's felonies.
> S/390-64 (a/k/a z/Architecture), SuperH, ARM, IA-64, MIPS, etc..
Isn't that more like saying "UNIX is portable" rather than saying "OS X is portable"? There are a lot of Linuxes running on a lot of platforms and a lot of UNIXes but I haven't seen a Linux that runs identically on PPC and Intel so much so that you can't tell them apart, the way Mac OS X does
> Don't forget that the abbreviation is parsed as (Mac OS) [version] Ten. Saying "OS Ten" is IMO merely due to the American predilection
... you make movies, music, Web apps on a Mac, but most of your friends just watch them or use them or talk about them on their iPhones.
... it is already over.
> towards brevity.
So your problem is the missing "Phone " before the name of the iPhone's operating system.
The reason for this is that the "OS X" on the iPhone is actually the One True OS X. It's the OS X for everybody. It's the OS X that's going to be "THE" OS X in a short while, and it will be a great advertisement for the Mac, which has become the development platform for iPods and iPhones
iPhone is the same exact thing as Mac, only one step easier. Get it? It is hard for Slashdot to imagine why such a thing would even be necessary.
Look at the numbers on phones versus PC's
> a big deal out of it running OSX. That creates certain expectations
> For example: OSX runs 3rd party applications.
I think you managed to hit on the "OS X expectation" that was the very last on Steve Jobs' list.
I imagine he wants you to expect your iPhone to be reliable, have great networking, power management, rich graphics, great type, animated/scaling interface, ease of use, "just work", support standards, have great audio/video multimedia, be on the cutting edge of technology, be user-centric, stay "out of your way", be ruthlessly refined.
Although iPhone looks like it will be mainly for Web apps, it is always on the Web and has a full-featured "Web 2.0" browser. What kind of third-party app is it that you think you want to run on your iPhone that can't be done as a Web application?
> Why would Apple write a whole new high level audio and video API, when the existing software they are porting is
> written to use Quicktime? It just makes no sense.
Because rather than a general purpose CPU upon which you can run arbitrary codecs, iPhone has MPEG-4 decoder hardware, same as iPod.
MPEG-4 is ISO QuickTime, but so far you just have AAC audio movies, and AAC/H.264 audio/video movies, like what you get at iTunes Store (exactly like). A movie with Flash in it or Java can't be saved as MPEG-4 yet. The multitude of tracks that QuickTime can support and all the authoring features may not be needed at this time in the iPhone.
> Jobs calling it "OS X" is only an attempt to piggyback on the perceived superiority of that platform.
... it's walking on its own feet. If it comes from parents with a good reputation then it will benefit from that reputation.
If it has the same software architecture and features, it is hardly piggybacking
> It is likely that they are leveraging the OS X code base but that is another matter.
If they are, then the name should not only reflect the heritage but announce it proudly so that EVERYBODY KNOWS THERE IS A PHONE WITH OS X RELIABILITY AND FEATURES. Because that's what people want.
It's a little thing called communication for crying out loud.
> Quicktime and PDFKit are required to run Safari, so it should be part of the package. Besides, the whole iPod enchilada
... clicking a link to an MPEG-4 media could just play it in the iPhone's iPod.
> is based on Quicktime, so I can't see how you figure it is not included.
Nooooooooo.
The iTunes enchilada is based on QuickTime.
The iPod is MPEG-4 decoding hardware and so is the iPhone. There is no general purpose CPU upon which you can run arbitrary codecs. Instead you have ISO MPEG-4, H.264 and AAC, and that's all you get. Also right now QuickTime is being rebuilt as MPEG-4 after ISO standardization so you would expect to see QuickTime features show up later in iPhone as further MPEG-4 features. If you have to leave stuff out, you leave out the non-standard playback codecs and the authoring codecs, and if you have limited CPU, you do the MPEG decoding in hardware.
There is definitely no Flash in iPhone right now, this is verified by Jobs post-Keynote (also no Java). Flash is already in QuickTime for many years so that means there is no QuickTime in iPhone. Since Flash is not ISO MPEG-4 it can't be decoded by hardware and ARM 1GHz is not enough to run YouTube. Flash on phones lacks video so it is not just Apple.
Finally, iPhone is a Webkit-based browser, just like Safari, but it is not in fact, Safari. How Jobs could have explained this to the layman in any better way than saying "it's Safari" I don't know, but the technically accurate way to say it is "it's Webkit". If iPhone lacks QuickTime then its browser won't require it. It is likely that iPhone's Web browser completely lacks plug-ins because they are the worst tire fire in Web development. A proper way to play MPEG-4 audio and video inline in the browser would be nice but they don't have to provide that
> not even a VGA phone
When they say "VGA" in a phone, I thought they meant 320x480, which is half a VGA. That's what the iPhone has.
Jobs clearly said it's the highest res display Apple has ever shipped, at 160 ppi. The next best is about 130 ppi on a MacBook. Apple specifically stopped going to higher pixel densities until after Leopard and its resolution independent UI, which is obviously in the iPhone.
> except that Microsoft never pretended that they were running the "full desktop OS"
Microsoft conflates the separate versions of Windows CONSTANTLY. During the anti-trust trial in the 1990's it came out that in all of their head-to-head marketing materials (e.g. features of "Windows" vs features of "Linux") they used DOS/Windows features where it was advantageous to them, NT/Windows features when advantageous, and even CE/Windows when it was advantageous (e.g. low-power draw or instant-on). Each of these three Windows systems had an entirely different codebase at the time, and even ran on very different hardware. The only relation was all made by Microsoft and branded Windows.
In the iPhone, Apple is clearly using the actual full-scale desktop stuff, for example WebKit. You should be able to load the same Web page in iPhone and in Safari on the Mac and notice things like CSS measurements being exactly the same, or you could find the same rendering bug from WebKit in both places. That is also true of PDF rendering, driver I/O, networking, and all kinds of other stuff. At some point there will be a security advisory that affects only "OS X" and you will see it on both the Mac and iPhone because the same code is there.
It's the same Google Maps from the browser but it is running in a Widget essentially, and gets a few special privileges that make for a better user experience.
The Google CEO is there more to show Google's enthusiasm for this kind of device, which is the client to Google's "cloud" servers in their way of thinking. He joined the Apple board right after the iPhone started being developed. You CAN run Google from your PC, but you're not supposed to. You're supposed to carry it with you on your person. If Apple didn't build this, maybe Google would have had to, but they are glad they didn't. That's what that ApplGoog comment was about and him saying that companies should do what they're best at. I think the Google CEO and probably founders also and many others inside Google see the iPhone as the beginning of the end of their beta testing.
What he's saying is that the "front-end" on both the Mac and iPhone is the SAME.
On the Mac, you have windows, icons, menus, mouse, and on the iPhone, a multi-touch screen, but in both cases you have PDF-based, resolution-independent, 3D animated graphics that meet certain high-end standards with regards to masking and compositing and transitions.
Imagine that instead of an iPhone, Apple introduced a new Mac notebook with an extra little iPhone-like touch screen on the outside of the case, so that when the notebook was closed, you could access contacts or listen to music without running the whole system. We would not be surprised if the UI still looked the same on the touch screen part because it looks like what OS X would "want" to offer you as an interface if you didn't have room for a mouse and such. An experienced Mac users can see the same stuff going on in the iPhone interface that they're used to from Mac OS X. It is smooth and 3D and beveled and animated and things scale up or down or fade in and out instead of just appearing or disappearing. There is a visual language there that Apple is speaking in both devices.
> What the iPhones has is an entirely new operating system also known as OS X that is likely related to Mac OS X but distinct.
... they want to brag that they will give you the same experience in iPhone. They want to point out the OS X reputation for being high-quality and highly-desired.
Wow you are actually arguing that porting a software product to another platform changes it into an entirely different software product. That is usually the kind of thinking that is done when one's head is up one's ass. Your post is full of straw men. The Mac OS X development tools have nothing to do with the iPhone or with its OS X.
When was the last time you saw "an entirely new operating system"? The best candidate would be Mac OS X from 2001 but even there you have a very strong Mac and Next and UNIX heritage. Before that maybe Linux in 1992 but that is also very much descended from UNIX. The idea that the iPhone would use an entirely distinct and unique resolution-independent PDF-based UI from the Mac is bizarre compared to the idea that they would use the same one. They not only want the same kind of flashy, smart, motion UI in the iPhone as in the Mac, but they are proud of the Mac
No, you cannot run Mac apps on the iPhone, due to the lack of a Mac. Note that it says "OS X" on the iPhone, not "Mac OS X".
The resolution independent UI stuff in iPhone is hot in Mac development right now. It was in Tiger in a test version and the real version is a big feature of Leopard.
Instead of storing a bitmap button they are skinning vectors, like Fireworks or Painter. The OS generates pixels on the fly as required by the metrics. How third-party developers are going to work with this is still being worked out on the Mac, never mind on the iPhone.
> Saying that it's OS X means nothing.
... the reason to actually brand it "OS X" is for Apple to promise their future iPhone customers that the iPhone will live up to the Mac OS X reputation at the operating system level. It won't be crashy, it won't be buggy, it will perform for you to the OS X standard.
... just the font.
"OS X" means reliability, rich graphics, high-end type, audio/video multimedia, networking, multitasking, user-focused interface, ease of use, staying-out-of-your-way, unrelenting progressive technical advancement.
That's what "OS X" means because that is its reputation.
If you tell me that my bank machine is running "Windows", I won't want to use it because I will feel that it will be untrustworthy, broken, maliciously designed when it's designed at all, incompatible, error-prone, insecure, disrespectful of my privacy and other rights, and not worth my time or money to even be involved in.
That's what saying something is running "Windows" means.
It's about reputation.
In addition to that, the iPhone OS X is actually made from the same stuff as Mac OS X. Same libraries and code and architectures. But that could also be true if it was called "iPhone OS"
If Apple wasn't willing to stand on OS X's reputation that would be the drag. They didn't port Mac OS 9 to the original iPod
The iPhone has a full Web browser that can run the most sophisticated and demanding Web application, including parts of HTML5.
... it is outrageous. It is just drag-and-drop most of the time but they don't want to know because so much comes in the box already and Apple even updates it for you. They would rather use a half-assed Web app that requires NO MAINTENANCE than install a free app that is twice as good, and they are right a lot of the time.
It runs Amazon.com, you know? It runs NYTimes.com. There is no lack of software for it already and it's not out yet.
One thing that many programmers are going to have to adjust to over the next 20 years is the idea that no, you're not going to get to run your code with privileges on any old box. Those days are so gone. The number of Mac users I know who don't know how to install applications on their system
Why would an iPhone user want to install an application on there when they are hooked onto the Web 24/7 with a real Web browser with all the trimmings including MPEG-4 media? So they can update that application later? So they can find out later it's recording their phone calls? So they can manage license keys, or whether or not the app can be run on both their iPhones or just one?
This device is even more personal than a personal computer. What is so wrong with staying in the Web sandbox? Put your executable code on a Web server and put an ISO front-end on it and you are iPhone-ready. You can test your interface in Safari on a Mac or in the WebKit nightly builds if you like but if it works in Firefox you are already there.
You don't even have to count pixels to make sure the Web interface you make is smaller than 320 or 480 pixels because the iPhone scales stuff. Just make a smaller-size Web page and you are done.
> Imagine a desktop environment which is free (XCode) has a basic switch to produce device code. That would be the true revolution.
There's nothing to say this isn't coming. All that has been said is that software is going to get onto the iPhone via iTunes, the same way that everything else gets on there.
Emacs is part of OS X.
> Smartphones and PDAs are so frustrating, all that cool hardware and so little access to it.
iPhone has an always-on Cell/Wi-Fi Web connection with a desktop-class Web browser that supports HTML 4.01, DOM Level 1, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.5, PNG 1.0, JPEG 1.0, and MPEG-4 audio/video, all with a tactile and a resolution-independent display with fast graphics.
In addition, when the phone charges, it's hooked into iTunes, where the user can add audio/video content, PDF books, games and other software.
How is that "locked down"?
Do you really need to do more than that on someone's Phone?
It is so much easier for them to port their existing, working, highly-capable, first-class operating system to the iPhone than it is to build something from scratch on the iPhone that would then appear to be ported from their existing operating system.
... very small number of pixels, and the iPhone is obviously doing the same resolution-independent tricks that Leopard does (and Tiger does in a test version if you know how to turn it on) so why build that again?
From what we understand, the iPhone has a 1 GHz ARM CPU in it, and of course at least 4 GB of "disk" storage. How is that not good enough for UNIX? There is also likely a hardware MPEG-4 decoder for the audio/video playback. For the graphics, it is only 320x480, which is exactly half of a VGA display
Also, the whole philosophy of Cocoa is that you make a huge framework and then build on it, so they are not going to leave their frameworks behind on the Mac as they move to a new kind of device.