ashu

Your question should be an independent Ask YC thread. I want to know the answers too. (and I have none!)

The "twice as fast" and "half the price" ads were rather disingenuous. The "most advanced operating system" -- what? that's true only if you consider how great it looks. Otherwise, we can easily rattle off many Unix variants which kick OS X's ass when it comes to performance. Xcode: "the best IDE ever". MobileMe: "you can't believe this is a web-app, unheard-of usability in a web-app!" It just doesn't stop. They go overboard.

As for the "I'm a Mac" ads, they are not that bad at all.

Disclosure: I own an iPhone and am madly in love with it. I also own a new iMac, and love its looks and would like to make OS X work for me, but have not been very successful at that. Perhaps because I am just used to Linux.

You may have a different requirement from a product (OSS, etc. - I myself prefer to use Linux because of the open-ness) while others may have different (wanting it to look good, do the common things without a hassle) - but why is that a reason to say "passing off crap"? I will agree to the iPhone complaints, so they botched up the launch by sending out a half-baked product. The 2.1 update seems to have fixed a lot of problems for many people. The iPhone is driven by software a whole lot more than other phones are, and so gets updated at a very high rate. That is a good thing. How many phones you know keep adding features to themselves or fixing their own bugs via software updates? Or do other phones just not have any bugs or annoyances?

I will admit, though, that Apple tends to go overboard with its cheesy marketing tricks and ploys many times. They should let the products speak more. In most cases, they just do.

Funky, but bizarre and not sure it is very reader-friendly. (or even author-friendly, for that matter since most authors spend a lot more time reading and searching the stuff they write.)

The grand-parent is merely suggesting that Pretty is good and ugly is bad. NOT saying that is the only thing that matters. So your comment is not a refutation. (and hence, I see no reason for sarcasm either.)

Why not jailbreak? It's trivial, pretty much risk-free (you can always fully restore) and you are doing it only for testing this app -- and only until Apple approves you. You can at least make sure you get your app all debugged by the time other things fall in place!

certainly, it has got nothing to do with "India". perhaps, "native indian"

As for me, I hope somebody builds a spectacular killer app for jailbroken iPhones so that part of the economy gets opened up. I love my iPhone and programming for it way too much.

Also, this dude seems to belong to the typical "elitist" Mac people group. "crapware written by hobbyist students" -- WTF! A student won the official Apple competition for best Mac / iPhone app or something like it.

Do you have any evidence to support your assertion(s)? How can you be so completely sure of what is going on strategically inside large organizations like Microsoft or Google?

And one would have thought the commentators would actually do a better job than the O(1) work put in by the tech pundits.

Do people NOT get the fact that Chrome is open-source JUST LIKE firefox, and to the extent that Adblock Plus is NOT A DEFAULT EXTENSION on firefox, the same will carry forward for Chrome, no matter what the distribution mechanism?

coz there are many of us who would like to read the details on linux. that's one reason.

The reply is to an extreme douchebag who deserved that. I think it's a good idea to be firm and shut the trolls up quickly.

I thought Processing.js was just one such framework to work on top of Canvas.

Sorry, it was just an exaggeration. It was a snarky comment, mostly. I like the iPhone and the app store despite all these controls.

Welcome to the App Store. A free market-place! Where only the anointed few will compete.

There is a lot of discussion for two reasons: (1) the browser is really really good, and as some others have pointed out, it has the potential to really bring in a new era of computing. (2) anything to do with Google / Apple / Facebook is a HUGE link bait, and so news sites / bloggers want to milk it to the maximum.

Edit: also, the iPhone is right to be hyped despite all its flaws. Apple has shown us another way of creating an extremely elegant (albeit sometimes less than usable) user interface with little screen space. In the next few years, you will see everybody copying it and taking it to the next level. The iPhone is good not because what it is right now, but because of all the future potential it has unleashed. Also, a jailbroken iPhone is a hacker's dream despite the closedness of the platform.

That would be the most ridiculous reason they would want to develop a completely new browser for.

That does /not/ say that add-ons are discouraged, merely that they chose to make a browser on their own because current add-ons (and backward compatibility) would restrict their power if they had chosen to revamp current browsers.

get off your high pedestal and just don't upmod the story, will you?

Or, completely out, perhaps? I mean, the race has been going on for a bit, now.

please, allow extensibility in this, like firefox, and I am ready to say goodbye to Firefox!

They say Buxfer merged with Obopay. Would have been nice if they (or Obopay) had told _us_ about that as well.

And this screwed the founders, how? This article is w.r.t. VC partners robbing their Limited Partners of the investment opportunity. And even at that, as many others have pointed out, it's somewhat deliberately slanderous.

Of all the things, they probably picked the least misleading bit to ban them. The "twice as fast" was an easier pick. Also, "half the price".

I agree. But regardless of whether it is Apple or the music labels that are pushing it, it could explain the weird-ass closed format of the app-store.

<unrelated thought>

I think the real reason why Apple has kept such tight control over the App Store has nothing to do with the applications or quality, at all. It has to do with iTunes and music locking. If you opened up the device, it's only time before a variety of media players and mp3 syncing mechanisms will appear -- all without DRM, of course and without the restrictions (only sync with one device, etc. etc.) And that is what Apple can't afford to do. It could potentially cannibalize the entire iTunes business unit.

</unrelated thought>

That would not be guaranteed to be correct since you don't know the precise time required for the dbs to be consistent.

Wow, remarkably inspiring. That is the attitude of a true hacker. Keep building!

Absolutely! For folks who are technical enough to care about ssh'ing from their iPhones, a jailbreak is such a no-brainer. There's so little cost involved in it now with QuickPwn and stuff..

And runs slower than a retarded turtle? The iPhone has trouble running its Springboard GUI efficiently as it is.