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Daring Fireball (Articles)

Mac and web curmudgeonry/nerdery. By John Gruber.

Pt. 1: Macro

Let’s just say it up front: the iPhone is the greatest piece of consumer electronics that has ever been made.

If I could travel back 20 years and show my then 15-year-old self just one thing from the future of today, it would be the iPhone. It is our flying cars. Star Trek-style wireless long-distance voice communicator. The content of every major newspaper and magazine in the world. An encyclopedia. Video games. TV. Etc.

None of these features is quite what an imagination of the ’80s would have predicted. The TV, for example, is far from the imaginary “pocket TV” of my youth, which was rooted in the concept of broadcast TV channels. But it is a TV. In some ways it is worse; you cannot use an iPhone to, say, watch a live broadcast of a sporting event. In many ways, though, it is better; it stores content, including full-length major motion pictures, which you can watch whenever you want. A pocket full of movies was simply unimaginable 20 years ago. And it’s all in one easily pocketed gizmo.

Each of these features is of course available in devices other than the iPhone. A checklist of the iPhone’s features is not, in and of itself, impressive. Some competing devices, in fact, offer all the same fundamental features of the iPhone. The difference is in the overall experience. (Even a $10 Nokia dumbphone, combined with today’s worldwide cellular and satellite p

[Sponsor] SketchesOctober 6

Sketches is a beautifully designed, feature-rich drawing app for the iPhone. You can use it to take notes, decorate and annotate your pictures, or simply to have fun with your friends. With extensive drawing and sharing options, attention to detail, dedicated customer support and updates as frequent as the App Store allows, it will remain fresh and useful for many months to come. You can get it now from the App Store for just $4.99.

In the BackgroundOctober 6

I’ve written before about which apps are allowed to run in the background on the iPhone, but I’ve gotten a few emails about it in response to this footnote in my “The Fear” piece last week:

Even if Apple were to come to its senses and allow third-party developers to write competing email clients, the built-in Mail app would hold one significant technical advantage, which is that it runs in the background. In fact, background processing is the one factor that unites the four dock apps. Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod all continue running in the background; no other apps, including those from Apple, do.

Everyone knows that the iPhone SDK doesn’t yet allow for third-party apps to run in the background. But what’s misleading is that several other of Apple’s built-in iPhone apps seems to run in the background. Calendar event reminders and incoming SMS messages display pop-up alerts system-wide. And the Clock app’s timers and alarms continue running even after you’ve closed the Clock app.

But as I wrote back in March, these apps — the Cocoa Touch apps themselves — don’t run in the background. They post and set notifications through other means, system-level OS services that aren’t available (to my knowledge) through the iPhone SDK.

Another example

The FearOctober 2

The NDA is dead, yes, and good riddance, but there remain serious problems with the way Apple is managing the App Store. It boggles my mind that there remain so many people who don’t see this. This piece by Dan Kimerling at TechCrunch is one example; various of the reader comments on Jason Snell’s piece for Macworld last week are another.1

One factor, perhaps, is the tendency to see everything in terms of extremes. Black or white, good or bad. But this debate is not about wanting Apple to make radical changes, such as, say, changing the iPhone from a closed platform to a more open platform a la Android. There are reasonable arguments to be made that a more open iPhone platform would be good not just for iPhone developers, but for Apple and its shareholders. But those arguments aren’t what this debate is about. This debate is about wanting Apple to make minor changes — a slight but very significant course correction.

Put another way, this is not about the big picture scope of what kind of hypothetical App Store (or Stores, plural) Apple should have created. That train left the station long ago. This is about the specific details of the App Store that actually exists, and the rules that govern it.

I believe

Adobe Speaks of Flash Player for iPhoneSeptember 30

The Internet pipes are chock full of reaction to the news that Adobe is “working on” a Flash player for the iPhone, much of it based on the weird assumption that if Adobe can get it working well, Apple will publish it. Guess what? Apple isn’t going to publish it.

Think about it: If there were a Flash player for the iPhone, you could write games and other software in Flash rather than in Cocoa Touch. And you could sell games and apps directly for the Flash player, completely circumventing the App Store. Does this sound like something Apple would allow?

And, unlike with rejected apps like Podcaster and MailWrangler, a standalone Flash player app for the iPhone would directly violate the stated terms of the iPhone SDK, which state in section 3.3.2:

No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).

If Apple doesn’t want to allow a competing email client on the iPhone, why would they allow a competing (and cross-pla