Official iPad Thread

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No "multitasking"/fast switching for me.
My 3G iPhone is too old....

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hayaku: You're gonna love this.

Apple's New iPhone App Policy: Unreasonable and Unjustifiable - PCWorld

[hayaku]

they are absolutely nucking futs i tell ya...

also, in other news, iphone os 4.0 is jailbroken as well...

[rayxi]

What's crazier than Apple's totalitarian developer restrictions are the hard core fanboys blindly defending it as an "enhancement to the user experience". Anyone not drinking the kool aid can see it as an thinly veiled attempt to force app developers commit exclusively to Apple. I guess it's not enough that Apple is forcing the consumer to be Apple exclusive.

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Hacker news put's it another way;

What Apple really wants to prevent is people releasing multi-platform compilers. So taking Flash as just one example, if I can build one app and the compiler can make me an iPhone executable, an Android executable, and so forth, Apple doesn't want that.

In my experience so far with such "cross platform compatibility layers," they always produce results that water down each platform's individual strengths and differentiations. And of course, instead of the developer being locked into the phone platform, they are locked into the compatibility layer's platform.

Adobe's Flash compiler is a classic maneuver to "commoditize your complements," as Joel put it so well. Apple doesn't want to be commoditized, especially if it means having apps that don't take advantage of the iPhone's strengths.

Adobe wants to lock developers into Flash and commoditize everything else as Flash-delivery devices. Apple want to commoditize applications and lock developers into their APIs.

[rayxi]

That's a bogus argument. From the user's perspective, what's the difference between an application compiled on a cross platform development framework and the exact same (functionally) application coded directly against the Apple APIs? Nothing, except the fact that Apple will allow one but not the other.

Using the Apple APIs doesn't guarantee that applications will use the Appleisms. It only guarantees that Apple will have the their way with 3rd party developers and consumers who use Apple devices. Once developers commit to using the Apple API it will be economically onerous for them to recreate that application for other platforms because it means managing multiple code streams, which is exactly the type of control that Apple wants.

At least being locked into a development framework like Flash doesn't compromise the developer's ability to sell the application. If the developer uses the Apple API and Apple, for whatever reason, says they won't accept it, then the developer is screwed. Only developers towing the Apple line will survive.

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This article brought up some interesting points regarding where the "Web"
is headed.

HTML vs. Flash: Can a turf war be avoided? | Deep Tech - CNET News

A difference of opinion among developers has become a high-profile debate over the future of the Web:
should programmers continue using Adobe Systems' Flash or embrace newer Web technology instead?

"The Web (including video, games, animation) is too vital a platform for business, communication,
and society to be in the hands of any single vendor, "But it'll be a while; there is a huge body of existing content that uses Flash."

Very educational stuff that questions the use of Adobe going forward.

[hayaku]

wtf... iphone os 4.0 doesn't do true multi-tasking? only allowed for a few select apple apps to multi-task while others are still using the suspend-restart method, just presented on a fancy screen to switch?

lame-o

iPhone OS 4.0: The Multitasking Myth

[rayxi]

I'm no fan of Flash either. I'll shed no tears if Flash gets left in the dust in favor of HTML5. At least developers can choose whether or not to use it. The point here is that the direction taken is up to a larger stakeholder community, not a single vendor bent on total control.

[Quicksilver]

It could be that Apple has their mind on something that precludes the use of Adobe.

Six months ago an Apple analyst told me he thought the company’s long-term goal was to become the internet’s cable TV company. I didn’t get it then. I really get it now. Most think of Apple as a computer or consumer electronics company. I think that’s becoming a means to a much bigger end: becoming a giant news, entertainment and communications network with Googillian ambitions.

Most of its money still comes from selling computers, iPhones, iPods and iPads. But with its move into advertising, the spike in revenue from selling iPhone aps (four billion downloads and counting), as well as its move to take a percentage of book and other content sales on the iPad have NEW MEDIA COMPANY written all over them. It is moving to build the self-perpetuating effects that come with such a platform with astonishing speed.

The portals like Yahoo tried this. Their mistake? They didn’t make iPhones or iPads. Turns out, desktop and laptop computers and existing cell phones are lousy at consuming content. Everyone keeps running into the “lean forward lean back” problem. Computers are lean forward devices, but lousy entertainment machines. TVs are great to watch a movie on but lousy at doing email or web surfing.

The iPhone and probably the iPad are the first devices that truly solve this fundamental problem of media convergence. Probably because of their portability and touch screen, we are just as happy to do email and web surf as we are to lean back and watch a video or a movie with handheld, touch-screen devices.

I’ll leave the goodness or badness of Apple’s ambitions to others. What is not debatable however is that what Apple is doing has the potential to be a colossally huge business.

Cable TV companies’ are always constrained by their capital costs (laying and maintaining all that cable). Apple has none of those worries. I appears that for the moment all it has to do is keep making killer devices and software and the rest will take care of itself.

Devices like the iPad and iPhone generate audience, which attracts advertisers (a business Apple just said it was plunging into), which attracts content. It doesn’t hurt that Apple has proven to be one of the few online platforms capable of charging for digital content.

We can debate the pros and cons of Apple’s proprietary standards — as we have, and are — endlessly. As a matter of principal I don’t like them. Practically, they make things so easy that I’m not sure I care. Maybe Google’s model — control the software and let everything else take care of itself — will prove to be a better model.

But that was Microsoft’s model too, and we all know how happy we were about that. Maybe in the long term Apple’s platform will be popular enough, the content good enough and devices usable enough that it won’t have to lock us in.

What is clear is that with each passing day Steve Jobs is looking less and less like Sony’s co-founder Akio Morita and more and more like CBS’s Bill Paley — the man credited with inventing network television.

That is a very big deal indeed.

Fred Vogelstein is writing a book about the intersection of media and tech in Silicon Valley.



Read More Apple Goes Where The Portals Failed: It’s The Hardware, Stupid | Epicenter | Wired.com