Thanks for the input, islave…. funny how you assume I am touting android phones, despite the fact that I didnt mention, don’t own, nor intend on buying an android product. Way to polish that fanboy badge you got there.

… also what is your point, exactly? I’d take support for flash over animated gifs any day. It does seem like a ridiculous thing for Google to leave out, but I dont think your claim is 100% true anyway… it seems some Motorola phones running android have animated gif support via MMS & Image Gallery.

Awwwwwww, disproven. Next!

Personally, it’s a little like a snobby waiter in an upscale restaurant who won’t let you in with a tie, will frown at your choice of wine, refuse to bring you ketchup and give you a hefty bill afterwards.

But the food’s good and free of salmonella and all other restaurants in town are uninspired at best and badly run fast food joints at worst.

Guys, I’d *love* something like the iPad in an open format. Which means, glass, aluminium, snappy response time, consistent and snappy interface and mostly hassle free. Deliver that and I’ll at last *look* at it. I’m not promising to buy, because I already bought or loaded a bunch of iPhone apps, though. But I dumped my Newton, I dumped Palm when it became unbearable, I’m not married to Apple here.

Don’t know how successful they are, though.

a) Security

Taking root away and having one arbiter for software makes security cheaper.

b) appStore income.

They make some money of that. Not a very important business, but who knows, now that the get into the book market, too.

c) user experience

Apple wants to provide a singular, easy user experience with no problems. Not because out of the goodness of their heart, but because it sells better.

That’s really all I want: a chance to compile my own code. Sure, I could just download the source code and compile it myself with no changes, but that’s my choice of what to do with hardware I own. If I want to swap out an aging battery and extend the life of my phone (like I did with my RAZR until the hinge finally broke), then don’t ast as if I am snooping in your underwear drawer.

I prefer the Mac over the PC, and yes, the iPhone experience is very good, but I am still a tinkerer at heart. Steve Jobs never was, which is part of why he and Woz (the penultimate tinkerer) had such a falling out (though I understand they’ve mended fences since then).

While flash animation may suck the big one, it is a part of the internet, a part which apple continually ignores. If the iphone is unable to use a common internet format, then you can hardly claim the iphone’s net capabilities are unlimited.

/wake-up-call

I use both Windows and Linux regularly, because they work, they’re familiar, and – most importantly – they’re reasonably priced. I don’t have anything against Apple, it’s just that they’re not offering anything I want badly enough to justify the added expense.

For the record, I think ALL corporations tend to fall down on the evil end of the spectrum. Looked at relatively, though, Apple is FAR more evil than Google. At least Goggle thinks about it once in a while.

Is that no longer the case, and/or will Tim Bray change the policy?

And “every other device” is just plain wrong. Can you write code for your postscript-interpreting prinzer? Your washing machine?

If you want to tinker, jeailbreak your iPhone, seeing as you don’t mind voiding your warranty.

Or drop 99$ a year.

That said, there seems to be plenty of innovation on software on the iPhone platform.

The iPhone is not “the mobile Internet’s future;” it is one device that offers a particular set of features. If you want just one device that lets you do everything you’d ever want to, this isn’t it. But neither is the Android, or any other platform: they all have de facto constraints. Notwithstanding that, even without *any* add-on apps from *any* source, the iPhone would have a pretty rich and compelling set of features. Third party apps are nice to have, but they are the icing on the cake. Web, mail, phone, calendar, address book, media player: these are the core functions and the main reason, I think, most people get a smartphone in the first place.

Open, standards-based, general-purpose computing platforms are awesome, but not everything has to be such a device, and we don’t benefit by insisting that absolutely everything be completely open and unmoderated. There is room for both iPhone and Android and the capabilities they offer; there is no need to take sides or pick winners.

Well I’d say their definition of freedom matches the dictionary meaning. Free(adj): able to act at will; not hampered; not under compulsion or restraint. The iphone is not a free device; some people (not you) take issue with that. In this instance you are the one trying to redefine what free means.

Maybe I’m not a normal consumer (or maybe I am?), but I see the iPhone and iPods as distinctly different experiences than my MacBook (or any laptop). Years ago, when I bought my first iPod, I knew going in that I was agreeing to Apple’s DRM, walled garden gadget, and I was OK with that because the user experience was worth it to me. Same with the iPhone and touch…I knew that to own those products, I compromised “open and free”. Apple made no claims otherwise. (Don’t know how I’ll feel about the iPad since I don’t have one yet.)

I suppose that’s the crux of my argument: I (and many many others) are OK buying into the Apple ecosystem. If I weren’t OK with that, I would buy something else. In that sense, a person is “open and free” to buy / not to buy an Apple product. It seems silly to me for someone to say he wants an iPhone but then demands it to be something it’s not.

I meant that people usually don’t hack their postscript engines, even though postscript is a turing complete language, requiring a powerful interpreter.

The iPhone and more importantly the iPad take this on the next level, they’re the iPod for programs, of rather “apps”.

That’s puzzling to the class of experts, probably even more puzzling than the idea of learning to read and write without being a merchant or priest.

The closest analogy I could think of would be car mods. I doubt Honda explicitly or implicitly endorses slapping glass packs and homebrew air intakes or bolted-together spoilers on stock Civics, but aside from know-how and laws prohibiting unsafe vehicles, nothing seems to stop the youngins’ from doing just that to their cars, and nobody accuses Honda of censorship.

The difference, though, is that you can’t get your apps from anywhere other than Apple. Nobody else can set up an app store for iPhones. It’s precisely the sort of monopolistic scenario that Apple whined about regarding Microsoft – on steroids. Sure, you can jailbreak your JesusPhone, until Apple plugs the holes – and Apple will happily turn it into an iBrick if you have the temerity step out of their walled garden. So much for “owning” what you paid for.

Apple has a long history of fantastic design hobbled by dickishness. From the original sealed-box Mac to non-user-replaceable iPod batteries, to the App Store fiasco, when will it end? Any time I’m tempted to buy an Apple product, these dick moves are enough for me to say, “No way.”

We’re lucky there are other choices than what the two Steves (Jobs and Ballmer) offer. It’s a bit of a non-issue to me, anyway, since smartphones tend to be way too expensive both to buy and to use.

It should be noted that I used Linux on the desktop regularly from 1998 to 2004 or so, but I gave up when I realized that I spent more time configuring the workspace than working. Now I use Linux only on servers, etc.

Perhaps I like the Apple bondage.

I wouldn’t mind having an iPod touch like device to play with android on, though. Do they make those? I already have a phone, that happens to be an iPhone. Sue me.

iPhone is not equal to ‘the internet’. Use whatever you want to use, whenever you want to use it.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out Glyphboard (http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/125490362/glyphboard2) and PieGuy (http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guy)

There are many, many problems with the App Store, but that has absolutely nothing to do with Apple’s “vision of the mobile internet”, and everything to do with Apple’s vision for distributing native iPhone apps.

“What I specifically find interesting/weird is the complete conflation of the concepts of “the Internet” and “App Store”.

The App Store – the only supported way to distribute native apps for the iPhone – is a closed, controlled environment. You’re at Apple’s whim and mercy there.

But the web is as open on the iPhone as it is anywhere else. You can use it to visit the naughtiest sites in the world. You can throw dicks in Apple’s face in Mobile Safari all day. You can write a user-installable, offline-capable, rich, fullscreen web app for iPhone and tithe Apple no money and no control. It’s been done.

Now, JavaScript is no Cocoa, and CSS is no Core Animation. I’m not saying web apps are peers of native apps, on any current system. But you know who is saying that?Google.”

from:
http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/450496640/can-you-write-open-apps-for-the-iphone