Apple iPhone development limits

53 Comments
here.

Patience, Padawans. All good things come to those developers who wait for Apple’s timeline to unfurl.

53 Comments

  3. What the iPhone is really, is an iPod. It’s the best iPod Apple has ever made with a telephone attached as an afterthought. It does not deserve the label “Smartphone.”

    What’s truly sad is that being supposedly built on one of if not the world’s most advanced general purpose operating system, the phone is beyond woefully inadequate for even the least demanding power user.

    If you expect the level of functionality you got out of a Windows Mobile or Palm or NOKIA or Symbian device, forget it.

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  4. Oh no Apple doesn’t let the whiny geeky minority do what they want to do on a mass-market device! It’s the end of the world! The iPhone will suck!

    Wait. The iPod is a remarkably closed device and it seems to have done well without geeks hacking it.

    Most people don’t screw with their phones anyways, so isn’t this just another case of geeks whining about being able to do something they wouldn’t do? What, you’re going to throw a fit because you have more freedom to do something you’d never do? Shut up.

    I’m so *(&*&ing; sick of these idiots complaining about marginalia like this. It seems that every time they open their mouth, they begin another FUDstorm that gets people in a dither and it all comes to nothing.

    Face it. Slashdot dumped on the iPod and they were WRONG.
    You’re dumping on the iPhone and you are WRONG.

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  5. I’m no expert on what Web 2.0 and Safari can or cannot do. But why should Apple “open” up iPhone more? Apple is selling as many iPhone as it can make. Users love it. Except for the super-geeks, users are not complaining about lack of support Java or Flash (or about third-parties not being able to put apps on the iPhone). So what exactly is Apple doing wrong here? Nothing.

    At some point in the future, Apple may find it advantageous to add support for Java and Flash, and possibly open up the iPhone to developers to put apps directly on iPhone. But that time is not now. Now is the time to keep tight control and sell millions of iPhones to happy customers. They are happy because iPhone works exactly as promised without significant glitches.

    This is a lot like the arguments for Apple “opening” up iPod and iTunes. But as a business, if the momentum is going your way, why would you want to make changes?

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  6. It’s Apple product yes? And they can sell it to whomever and however they want right? Show me the “right” that says if a company builds a product, devs. have a right to develope for it? Go live in Cuba if you want “equality…”

    If Apple sells lots of iPhones without 3rd party devs. why would they have any care to open it up? They won’t, and I doubt we’ll see it any time soon, because they appear on track to sell 5 – 6 million of them this year…

    When development does arrive for iPhone, it’ll be games-based development.

    As for flash, Apple’s got it’s own reader in the works. As for Java, its likely to come, it’ll just be a bit longer.

    A document application, folders, Excel editor, copy/paste, etc… Apple can do all this without 3rd parties getting involved (as getting devs. involved only makes the product less functional out of the box, while costing more, and not being as drop dead simple to turn on and use).

    Cry over iPod and get mad over iPhone – whatever. What to develope, make your own platform.

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  7. Listen you chowderheads, shaddup already! What I read above is pretty much all speculation. There is so much we don’t know. Could the lack of Flash and Java have as much to do with some political turf battles between Adobe and Sun with Apple as anything else? Could Apple be negotiating with them for more attractive terms? I would not be surprised. We are but railbirds making what at times are educated guesses at best. And lest you forget, this is Version 1.0 of the iPhone.

    If you haven’t noticed, Apple has done a pretty good job of doling out news and developments surrounding the iPhone in little droplets over the past six months. I have little doubt that this was deliberate, and the fact that many of you slept on the sidewalk for a couple of nights to get an iPhone is testiment to how the public responded.

    Don’t get your panties in a knot, but you’ll have to accept the fact that Apple won’t give you everything you want all at once. And don’t be surprised if that thing you got moist dreaming about in a future iPhone won’t be available until Version 2.0 which will be announced on (insert WAG date here). Such is life. I have a hunch that the things you want either missed the cut because they would not have been ready in time for the initial release, or were still under development, or were wrangled in negotiations between Apple and other companies, or more.

    Do I want more stuff? Sure. Am I realistic enough to know that whining on this message board will accomplish nothing? Absolutely. Do you? Probably not. So what will change all this? Time. Market forces. Competition. That’s life, kiddies.

    If you have ever worked around a software company, you realize that somewhere on a white board is a list of everything you want. But at some point, the company has to cut off what makes each release of hardware or software, tough decisions are made, and some really cool features get pushed off until the next big release. This is how the game is played. Sometimes, it’s because the people on a group responsible for finishing a specific feature are behind schedule, so their feature misses the cut. Sometimes, it’s because of budgets. Or because there aren’t enough people on hand to get things done. Sorry, but that’s the truth.

    So many of you ask why you can’t have it now. If any of you studied economics in college, you may recall that it’s about scarcity, and how to deal with it. Big though Apple may be, it has limits too. My advice: deal with it.

    I’d love to see more apps flourish for the iPhone as much as the next schmuck. Eventually, they will. But for now, I am amazed at what Version 1.0 of the iPhone is, warts and all. I hope that some of you are too.

    As for the rest of you, I can only ask this: pick two, you knuckleheads…

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  8. So you think there aren’t cool things to be had for the iPhone? Think again, bucko. Check out some of these:

    From boingboing.net: “Tart up your iPhone with these 320 x 480 crops of great works by legendary erotic photographer Steve Diet Goedde (produced on request by BB readers’ popular demand — evidently, a lot of Goedde fans read this blog). No full nudity here, just lovely, classic alt-cheesecake.”

    Here’s the link: http://www.stevedietgoedde.com/iphone.htm

    Or check out Google’s new Telekinesis for iPhone – you’ll be blown away! It’s a remote desktop for iPhone. You can browse your Mac desktop’s file system and view images and documents. Playing media files seems to be in their plans… but this is a pretty awesome taste o whats to come! Here are two related links:

    http://code.google.com/p/telekinesis/
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonx/732542457/

    Or check out the Hollywood Animation Archive for some amazing new wallpapers for your iPhone: http://www.animationarchive.org/

    And you thought there was no new development for the iPhone. Yeah, right.

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  9. Anybody else starting to feel like MDN’s take is just not worth reading since its essentially the same, every time the article is not in apple’s favor. I am a developer and I love apple, but not providing an SDK and then adding assault to injury by asking developers to drool all over themselves because they are letting us develop web apps is just ridiculous at best.

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  10. There’s a lot of strawmen in this thread. Annoyed developers aren’t saying the iPhone sucks because they can’t develop real and robust apps. No one is saying Flash and Java are never coming to the iPhone (and really, only the invested care; fuck Flash and Java). And opening up the iPhone to 3rd party apps has little to do with increasing iPhone sales.

    Here’s my speculation on why Apple isn’t opening up iPhone to 3rd party developers: the iPhone user runs as root.

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  11. Apple: WE NEED FLASH NOW! It isn’t the web in 2007 if you can’t use flash. Like it or not, Flash is THE standard web streaming video format of the moment. I don’t want to just be locked into viewing Youtube on my phone. Youtube sucks now that the copyright cartels are all over it. Let me access DailyMotion, Yahoo Video, LiveVideo and all the other flash-based video sites, and I’ll be happy.

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  12. Or check out Google’s new Telekinesis for iPhone – you’ll be blown away!

    It is impressive for a tiny, tiny remote desktop, but Google only hosts the code. The very pages you link to point out the developers.

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  14. Actually, I have a wonderful app that I would want for my iPhone. I was thinking about “how to do it” this weekend and I came up with a pretty good solution:

    Write it as a Mac app in Cocoa and wait.

    There are some things we can assume about the iPhone. For example, don’t expect a file system in any way you can imagine. Use Core Data to store your info. You don’t have a menu bar. You should have one window sized at 640 x 480 pixels and have everything occur in that.

    Assuming you design it right, when the iPhone SDK comes out, you should be 75% of the way there.

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  19. Proprietary tech like Flash needs to die for open standards to move forward. Having components of the WWW tied to one vendor in any respect is a recipe for abuse and stagnation. The PC desktop is a classic example, having suffered under Windows for decades. Even the Linux world has suffered, obsessed as they are with making a copy of Windows so as to be familiar to the target demographic rather than force the improvement of the state of the art.

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  22. I agree with Apple on this one.

    This is a new direction in phones and portable palmtops. And it should be carefully rolled out from launch. Now, many yell about letting things happen, but quality is “job” one.

    I would rather have a stable iPhone and one that will open new directions in media content and the reduced reliance on flash, Microsoft, and others. This is one way to do it and to boot give a quality product, experience, and gain new mac users.

    So patience is better than problems.

    And to believe this has been out for such a short time and people are busting a nut trying to complain on Apple’s direction when the whole standard has just been revised!!!

    Hey, anyone notice that even youtube has transfered from Flash to H264 so they can be viewed on the iPhone??? And it is still not complete…. so chill and relax while Steve brings out the next level>>>>>> Peace to the over sprung!

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  23. Well I agree with MDN. Apple is a software and hardware company, the two have to work WELL together.

    I have heard all the “third party” stuff before, i.e. there are more programs for Windows than for Macs. Then when you have a look at the programs, well most of them are absolute crap. You might as well buy underwear with more skid marks on it with that kind of reasoning.

    You want that and high levels of geek functionality, buy another phone. If you want ease of use, a great interface along with what the iPhone is then go ahead. And the iPhone is a web browser, music player and phone tool. It is new and knowing Apple the apps will flow, if you have patience, remember this is a first release and the upgrades won’t cost you a new phone.

    The iPhone never promised chat, the ability to copy and paste, delete multiple items in a list. Putting a GPS on it would be useless right now, as it is only sold at the US, and most of the world knows that Americans learn about global geography through invasion. Heck if you can even get email that is a bonus. The biggest bonus is YOU CAN’T ADD RINGTONES. Ringtones are incredibly obnoxious.

    Not having Flash or Java will probably be temporary. Once again, third party Java apps, yawn and gag.

    Read the man’s lips, it’s a phone, an internet browser and a music player (iPod). You want a kitchen sink, go to the hardware store.

    Signed Road Warrior, the original, not to be confused with the gutless imp Road Warrior.

    Reply

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