Jim Dalrymple, on Google’s delayed release of android honeycomb source code:

Can you imagine if it were Apple delaying a software release. What would the press say if Apple admitted it took shortcuts with its OS to keep up with Google and now they couldn’t release it? The press would have a field day with that story.

Yeah.. Except that Google has already made as much of a release as Apple ever does - closed binary source code. I don’t like that they’re delaying the open source code release, but I’d like it even less if they never did so (as is Apple’s way).

It would be stupid of them from a product point of view to delay the release of actual shipping products while they re-work the software do things it doesn’t yet need to do (work on phones). At the same time, I really would not want honeycomb ported to phones by over-eager phone manufacturers. I had to get rid of HTC Sense because it was too buggy, and that’s considered to be one of the best manufacturer mods. I hate to think of the bad name they’d give honeycomb…

(And while we’re playing the comparison game, remember how Apple didn’t unify the iPhone and iPad OSes until a number of months after the iPad release? Seems like a familiar strategy…)

So apparently iPhone OS 4 (or iOS, as it’s now awkwardly named), still has no way to sync data in the background. “Multitasking done right” indeed.

To be clear, that means that for every application that syncs data with the web, you must explicitly open it (and maybe tap some buttons) to initiate a sync. If you have a third-party mail client, an RSS reader, a todo list and instapaper, that’s quite a lot of tedium to go through every time you want to sync data. Heaven forbid you have more than a handful of apps that might need to talk to the internet without your explicit direction.

Get over your ego, Apple, and just copy android properly next time.

A really nerdy joke, but also a perfectly arguable stance within the language of the agreement. I love it.

Personally, I can’t believe the nerve of Apple these days. It’ll be interesting to see what fallout (or depressing lack thereof) comes from their ever-increasing paranoia.

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John Gruber discusses PastryKit, Apple’s fancy webkit library for making surprisingly native-looking apps in the MobileSafari browser. I’m uneasy:

Everything related to scrolling is implemented within the app itself, in JavaScript.

Ugh… Is that sort of thing really what we want to encourage in app development? For particularly well-thought out examples, like picasa’s, it makes some sense. But for a mobile device, with limited resources, handling low-level UI events in Javascipt? Come on…

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