The Pains Of iPhone OS Development

JWZ has written a pretty scathing (yet very entertaining) indictment of the whole "it runs OS X" aspect of iPhone OS programming. Some choice quotes:

I think it's safe to say that MacOS is more source-code-compatible with NextStep than the iPhone is with MacOS.

That's like, the defining characteristic of OpenGL. So OpenGLES is just a slight variant of OpenGL, in the way that [a] unicycle is a slight variant of a city bus. If you can handle one, the other should be pretty much the same, right?

Granted, most of his gripes are with the APIs, not the environment, but it is pretty lame that you can't, for example, get the HSV version of a color on the iPhone. Like he says, it feels like someone actively sought out and removed valuable API hooks. Le sigh.

Two Cool Things About Google Buzz

Because if you can't say anything nice...

1. Buzz will group together posts that you make in a short span of time. I shared four articles from Google Reader in the space of about a minute, and they appeared as one "Buzz," like so:


2. Buzz on the iPhone gives you two lists: the buzzes of those you follow, and the buzzes of those nearby geographically. I presumed this was done using Google Latitude, but it seems like they're getting the info from elsewhere.

Also, I wrote this post on my iPhone. It wasn't very comfortable, but it wasn't very painful either. Looking forward to trying out the iPad to see if the larger form factor makes it nicer. I'm almost as excited as Mr. Forstall here:



"You don't even think about it! You just....do!"

Preach on, Scott.