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The iPhone, light years ahead of other devices
Yesterday I read a rant about how the iPhone is a crappy Mac. The author is completely misguided; he's comparing a handheld device to a desktop saying what it doesn't do. It comes as no surprise that the author writes desktop applications and not handheld applications. I've been writing handheld applications for most of my career; I started writing Newton applications in 1994 and then started writing Palm OS applications around 1997, I think. In terms of a handheld device, the iPhone is not only a joy to use, but it is a joy to develop applications for it. While the Newton was way ahead of its time when it was canned, it didn't survive long enough to be a competitor in today's world. If you look at Palm OS, it is still so backwards. It has never (natively) supported different screen sizes (the Dana and the HandEra 330 had extensions to handle larger screens), it doesn't have protected memory, it has no where near the capacity of an iPhone and many applications don't look as elegant as iPhone apps.
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AppStore approval mechanism has a lot to be desired
Today I saw a new program at the app store called "I Am Rich". The description says:
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No financial incentive to recycle
Here in San Diego we have free trash pickup (for single family residences) due to the People's Ordinance of 1919 which I believe came out of the city selling refuse to pig farmers and making money on it (hmmm, it would appear that the city leaders back then had some of the same issues of public trust as the current ones). With free trash pickup, what incentive do we have to recycle? We recycle as much as possible and just started a compost bin last week to reduce the amount we send to the dump. If the city wants to encourage more recycling, they should offer a financial incentive (don't take away the free trash pickup) to say lower property taxes or something like that. The city is already in hot water as state law requires it to recycle more, but it isn't meeting that. While people should just feel good about "going green", let's be realistic. Unless it positively or negatively affects people's wallets, it just isn't going to be adopted by everyone.
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PDFKit is borked
I love that Apple has lots of frameworks for me to use in my apps and gives me things for free such as PDF viewing and manipulation. This is with PDFKit. The problem with PDFKit is that it isn't very tolerant of PDFs created from various other applications. I reported a bug with this back in the 10.4 era and it got fixed; I simply added a keyword to a PDF using Preview and it crashed (this is the same thing I do in ReceiptWallet). Now, I was pointed to another PDF that has the same behavior. The steps to reproduce this are quite simple: