Issues with smartphone apps

3) "Applications work unless they don’t." Not just a smartphone thing! And it isn't done on purpose. The OS shouldn't just magically skip over conditions which cause crashes normally (that could create infinite loops for instance). Naturally, he hasn't actually explained how this would be possible. Maybe he knows a magic spell that will work?

4) "The application development environments don’t leverage any of the new ideas in software engineering". Like Keltex says, unit testing is included. And whilst I'm unsure about the iphone SDK (haven't used that), I see plenty happening in the android toolkit which isn't exactly archaic (and I'm only 3rd chapter in the book).

I wouldn't put Ruby on Rails on a pedestal anyway. There isn't a single published book out there that I could find where the 1st example provided wasn't broken (I tried at least 3 of them ). All used depreciated API's, or relied on a much older version of the eclipse addon. So clearly the Ruby developers have a thing to learn about stabilising their API.

6) "Password sprawl." Welcome to OpenID. Maybe he should avoid all sites which don't use it? The good thing is that we wont see him on hacker news because it doesn't support it. I'd love to hear his solutions for this. Granted OpenID isn't the most secure technology in the world, I don't see him suggesting any ways to make it work better.

It's worth noting that the author is an eBay employee too. That's semi-hypocritical, considering that Paypal, skype or ebay (all the same company) don't use OpenID. In fact, of all the large companies out there, they are the ONLY one without even a company-wide means of centralised login (yup, even Yahoo has a single sign in mechanism for their services).

Sorry, but this article seems to be living in fairy land. I'm not saying his wrong, but he doesn't provide any worthwhile solutions or evidence that his suggestions can be done anyway. I think I can simplify them "don't crash", "be totally secure", "magically centralise all your logins", "make coding different, and uber easy". Yes, all that stuff would be nice in theory. But if he trusted his ideas (like the store), he'd go implement them.

OH WAIT! Yes, that's right, its rumored eBay (his employer) wants to get into the mobile application sales business. And yes, I guess providing featured applications would make sense to them then. I'm guessing the implementation he's proposing is to offer the market provider slightly more profit, for the opportunity to be featured? Yeah.. Funny that..

Well since Ruby on Rails is a web application stack I'm not sure how this applies. And both the Android and iPhone SDKs include unit testing...

1. IE comes to mind 2. sub radio for bandwidth 3. yep 4. not so much 5. uh huh 6-8. security as afterthought 9-10. web's a wilderness