I went to the first WWNC in Paris, and it was a great event.

vandil: I already have an iPhone. Got it the day of release. Can you print from your iPhone? Can you beam a contact? What about notes...can you read your iPhone's notes on your Mac? What was that, no notes sync, Apple forgot about that?

My messagepad 2100 has a screen more than twice as big as my iPhone. Because it uses a pen, it's a lot easier to draw on it compared to the iPhone.

The iPhone is only slightly a replacement for the Newton. The Newton still does a lot of stuff that the iPhone can't do. The Newton does things the iPhone doesn't *try* to do. A tablet iPhone would be a serious competitor to the Newton.

Don't, of course, get the mistaken impression that I'm claiming the Newton is better in every way than the iPhone, or that there aren't serious issues with the Newton. Newton is not a practical platform for most people nowadays. It's like a classic car in many ways.

flokru:

The iPhone is still the best platform out there. It's still got a great UI and has thousands of apps. And, because it's so easy to charge for apps, developers are much less likely to get distracted and forget about their apps - especially now that apps are listed in chronological order by default. That encourages updates.

Apple is doing something stupid here, but don't lose sight of the good apps that are out there. Hopefully this stupidity will be just a short glitch.

Is that the philosophy behind Microsoft's software? If they expect things to work, they will?

As a computer scientist, I can assure you that expecting software to work is a disaster. People always bring me problems that were caused by them expecting one kind of input and getting a different kind.

Good software comes from thinking through all the things that can go wrong. Same with good engineering of any kind.

Telling people that it's their fault their bike got stolen, because they kept thinking it might get stolen is asinine. It's not supported by reality. It's new-agey BS that's been made up to sell books and movies.

Also, it's not a "law". Laws are phrased precisely. Even if it were true, and it isn't, it still wouldn't be a law.

What about the world's smallest 3.5 incher?

I would like to see a 3.5" drive in the smallest case they can manage, with an internal power supply.

Yes, I know, a 2.5" drive is the best for portability. But I want speed and capacity. I'd like something in-between 2.5" and the standard 3.5" external drives with *zero* attention to portability...

Your statements about push are factually incorrect in at least one, and possibly more, ways:

1. When you have an open TCP connection to a remote computer, your software and sit and wait until the other computer sends something. Zero network traffic until the app at the other end decides to send you something. (You may need to send a single packet every 20 or 30 minutes to keep connections through a NAT alive..)

2. The iPhone *definitely* does push over WiFi, with the cellular radio disabled. I just sent three messages to my iPhone and they each took less than 10 seconds to arrive.

I know that some phones have, in the past, used SMS messages as triggers. It's possible that the iPhone does that. However, the iPhone is definitely able to do push *without* SMS, and, I *suspect*, doesn't actually use SMS for it at all - but I don't know about that part for sure.

Apple's sorting algorithm is rather "naive"...

It sorts apps in a case-sensitive manner; lower case app names go to the bottom.

Of course, very few apps start with a lower case letter other than "i"...

So, while it's technically unfair that iApps go to the bottom of the list, I don't think it's all that bad. :)

The SDK is based around a version of the iPhone OS that's in beta. Think of it sort of like a new version of XCode that supports features in Leopard. You can't build applications for the current iPhone OS, only for the new one that is still in beta.

When Apple talks about using this SDK in-house, remember that the Apple people using the SDK are likely a few doors away from the guys building the SDK. If there's a problem or a bug in the SDK, they can sit down for a few minutes and work out how to fix it. If the documentation is fuzzy or ambiguous, then you can ask the author.

A publicly released SDK is going to have way more people using it, without the direct assistance of the authors, and they are also likely to complain a lot more.

When Apple speaks of having used this SDK for the last year, they don't mean they used the final, completed product. They started with an early alpha that was probably not really ready for us to use, and kept working on it over many months...

The $292 cost you mention is an estimate of the parts cost, from a third party. It isn't necessarily very accurate, and it does not include the software cost or any R&D.

I think it's quite inaccurate to suggest that the iPhone is unquestionably un-subsidized because of the component cost. From what I have read of the development process, Apple went through a lot of revisions before they shipped - revisions that, based on the bugginess of the other smart phones I've used, would've actually been sold to customers by other companies.

As to whether he's thought every detail out, he's made some mistakes. The trashing he got from the development community when he described AJAX-based stuff as "sweet" at WWDC was ferocious. The whining and complaining about the $200 price drop took him by surprise. Jobs is good but he's not perfect. Part of the reason that Jobs is 10 steps ahead of the competition is that much of the competition simply makes stupid mistakes. Every smart phone I've used has had a long list of things that could've been trivially fixed in a few days of the dev team's time. What the competition lacks is somebody with the finely honed berating skills of Jobs to point out their mistakes.

I use an iPhone; previous watch was a Fossil running PalmOS.

I use an iPhone; previous watch was a Fossil running PalmOS.