| A lot to process in Apple's recent developer's preview of iPhone OS 4.0 (which will be the next iPad OS as well.) I'm going to try to just give a quick run down. Multi-tasking is finally arriving which has been a big missing piece at least in the sense of people talking about it being missing, if not in the sense that people actually ran into situations very often where they really needed it since the OS actually did multi-task - just not for 3rd party apps. In any case, it's here, and it looks to be pretty sophisticated in the sense of operating transparently to the user and not harming battery life very much. The trade off is that the implementation only allows specific activities to go on in the background. But these should cover what people want (allowing for VoIP, turn by turn GPS navigation, non iTunes background music streaming like Pandora.) Apple also announced an in App ad platform, iAd, which allows developers to easily place ads inside their applications. This is something they could already do by themselves, but this makes it much easier. Ads are built completely in HTML5 and do not take you out of the application when clicked on (presently ads open in Safari, taking you away from the app.) Apple takes 40%, but does all the hosting and takes care of the transactions. Personally I don't care too much about this, but it seems like an okay deal if you're a developer and there are certainly lots of apps that I wouldn't mind advertising to be a part of if it means I can download them for free. In terms of AAPL this could be a pretty big deal I think. And the giant Apple is great / evil debate continues to rage. Cory Doctorow is clearly the leader of the anti Apple camp with his post Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't either). Gizmodo's Joel Johnson takes the And lastly, now that the iPad has been in people's hands for a week we're starting to get some really thorough reviews. I'll go more into this later, but the major thing for me is what appears to be the only big negative. Apple just doesn't have document sharing and syncing worked out. This is exhaustively documented here. This is related to the general and radical way the iPhone OS deals with files. That is, the way it does away with the whole notion of a file system. This of course ties into the great debate above as the anti Apple camp sees this as only a bid for control while the other side sees it, variously, as the evolution of computing and a way to get this technology into the hands of everyone. But that debate is something of a trap I think if it stops us from thinking the real problem through. How can we make computers more simple, but not lose computing power in the process? Google's Android is perhaps way ahead in this one area as they really know how to use the cloud for storage. Apple is firmly tied to syncing through iTunes (attached through USB no less!) This could be the chink in Apple's armor. I don't think they have too long to get it right. Oh yeah, and also there was a change in the developer's tools terms of service which kills Adobe's plans to allow Flash developers to cross compile to the iPhone (and Android, and Windows 7, etc...) Much ink is being spilled on this as an extension of the great debate but really this is a sideshow in my opinion. If I have time I'll put a short summary in comments but basically this part of the debate (although not necessarily the whole debate) is being blown out of proportion. |
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"...Things the true heads hate: change in the developer's tools terms of service so certain developers (Flash, Monotouch) can't cross compile to the iPhone; file-sharing issues "not worked out yet" (hat tip im/weblog/?51217"Server Side for the info if not the rhetoric)..." |