The amazingness of iPhone-Friendliness

Websites can have an icon so that when a person puts that site on their iPhone home screen, they see that icon instead of a snippet of the body of the site. Think of it as a hi-res favicon. Here's mine:


Now, if you put the /rc/etc blog on your home screen, you will see that icon, just with rounded corners and a glossy look. Just one more thing in making my site perfectly iPhone friendly.

On Running Multiple Apps on the iPhone

So, the iPhone won't run multiple apps, due to a restriction by Apple. This is a good idea, as has already been explained many times: multiple apps on a phone with 128 MB of RAM and a processor underclocked to 412 MHz. However, some useful things are also shot down such as,

• The "badging" of icons on the home screen won't be in real time. Apple's mail app listens for when an email comes in, and then displays an update number on its icon. Apple's SMS app listens for SMS messages, and does the same thing when a message comes in. Third party apps won't be able to do this in the background, because they won't be running anything in the background. This will most likely be most damaging for a couple of kinds of apps: IM, Social Networking, Third-Party Email, VOIP. However, VOIP apps also face a special problem, specifically,
• VOIP apps cannot receive calls when they are not running. HUGE downside. According to apple, VOIP can only be used on a wireless network and not over the air, but if I was going to download and install a VOIP app, I would want to be able to receive calls at home using VOIP as well as the cell phone. Either an apple-blessed third party VOIP provider will get to run things in the background, or VOIP on the iPhone will be limited to making calls. As I said, HUGE downside.

iPhone SDK vs. Android

So, engadget published this table comparing the iPhone SDK, the iPhone toolchain, Windows Mobile, and S60. There are some things that appear to be inaccurate, such as no certificate signing and only certificate signing both being bad things. However, they forgot to mention something else still in development, specifically, Android. So, lets see where Android fits in on the table.

	iPhone SDK (Official)	Android
Cost	Free	Free
Wide Availablility	June	2008
Native Development	Yes	Yes
Languages for Native Development	Objective C	Java
Digital Certificates	Required	Unknown
Retail Support	Full, 30% Revenue Sharing	Unknown
Platform Maturity	BETA	BETA
First-party support	Yes	Yes
Community Support	Just getting started	Just getting started
App Installation Method	Direct via App Store, iTunes	Unknown
Emulator Available	Yes	Yes
Remote Debugging	Yes	No models yet
Target Device Variety	iPhone + iPod Touch (Some may argue this is a feature)	Linux phones
Touchscreen Support	Yes	Yes
App availability and variety	None, getting bigger by the minute	Unknown
Underlying Architexture	Cocoa, Mac OS X	Linux