I'm not necessarily talking about the application itself. I'm talking about the window decoration. I'm not a big fan of the non-brushed grey, either. But as long as they pick a single window decoration and stick with it, rather than having three different interfaces, that would be fine.

Re: ZFS... apparently it's an option.

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/06/12/no-zfs-for-leopard/

The postmonster ate my post. Summary of thoughts after watching keynote:

iPhone lack of SDK is even worse than I'd assumed. One literally launches Safari and goes to a bookmark. Their demo app is a a phonebook which literally does a round trip to the server for every step. That'll be fun over edge, especially when downloading the bitmaps to make buttons look like an iPhone app. It'll be even more useful when you travel outside the coverage area. The "no SDK needed" is a huge insult to all the developers who paid $$$ to be there to watch that go down. At least they didn't cheer.

The transparent menu bar is ugly. I don't understand who thought that would be a good idea. The dock seemed silly, but I'm undecided. They really should move it to the side by default, they're only selling widescreen displays these days.

Coverflow will impact battery life. The demands on the video card are one thing, but the demands on the hard drive are going to be much more. One can extrapolate from the 64 bit demo that the mac Steve was using had well over 8GB of memory. And you're gonna need it.

Matthew

Previous builds of Leopard had ZFS. The beta builds for WWDC were finalized and burned a few weeks ago - prior to Sun screwing up Steve's possible announcement.

There's no guarantee we'll see ZFS available in the final release. I'm keeping my fingers crossed it's there and it allows booting, but I won't be terribly surprised if it vanishes from the GM.

I understood that iPhone web-apps could be self-contained and downloaded to the iPhone. So it would be possible to create apps that didn't need the network at all. If the apps can have access to incoming calls and cause the phone to dial out, that assumes you're not already on an EDGE connection. Most people blabbing about this seem to ignore that aspect and assume the apps must be loaded from the internet in-use.

IMO, most people talking about the lack of an SDK just want to hear themselves talk. It's not something that's going to impact sales and it's not something 99.9% of consumers are going to care about whatsoever. Apps will be available from Apple and approved third parties. That's already been confirmed.

I haven't seen anyone mention specifically what apps they would like to see on the iPhone that are not already included or likely to be included. That is, other than VOIP that I already mentioned from day one.

The phone isn't out. Primary reason for lack of SDK is time to develop one. Secondary reason is to be able to lock out certain application classes until the handset is established - this is to appease ATT who would like shit a brick if everyone was using VOIP on a WiFi connection. The presence of WiFi also somewhat negates the need for faster data access of the cell network.

The BBS ate my response. Again.

Once again, summarizing my nicely composed post:

The keynote said nothing about persistent storage. The example application did not have it's own icon, and did not cache any data locally. Steve mentioned that there was no deployment process, implying that local storage wasn't coming either.

Some apps that can't be a web page: VOIP, Call Recorder, Navigation, Delicious Library remote.

Apple obiously has an internal SDK, even if it's not safe. Saying "we don't know how to develop a secure operating system for a mobile device" is the saddest cop out coming from Apple. "Not yet" would have been a valid answer. "Web 2.0" is not.

Maybe the iPod lovers will love the iPhone, but they're not going to convert a lot of current smart phone owners.

Matthew

Well, if nothing else, there are the Microsoft weenies touting the expandability of their own gizmos. For most customers, it doesn't really matter, but for some it's a very big deal.

- The Crackberry addicts needs synchronization with MS Exchange. Maybe somebody could pull that off with some kind of IMAP proxy, but it would probably be a whole lot easier if Microsoft, itself, built a "native" email client. Probably not going to happen.

- The Gmail addicts want offline Gmail support (and not through Apple's Mail client).

- The VOIP people want Skype, iChat AV, or other things along those lines. I imagine AT&T isn't thrilled about this, but it's almost reasonable to imagine some kind of weird API that lets these apps do whatever they want over WiFi but restricts their access to the Internet over GSM.

- God help us, but somebody's going to want a BitTorrent client, at least until they discover just how much it slams their battery life.

- Gamers want games. Tons of games. All manner of games. Solitaire could be done as a variant on a JavaScript Widget. Not so much with multi-player games that want to use the WiFi to find "local" peers.

- Random people want offline Widgets, which could run just fine as mostly-offline JavaScript (just add some semi-reasonable persistent state). For example, I might want a currency converter for when I'm traveling.

- Somebody's going to go nuts with voice recognition and Bluetooth. Just leave the iPhone in your pocket and interact with it entirely using your voice. Read your email aloud, etc. Something like that clearly needs to run native and interface with everything.

You can certainly do an excellent browser/controller for Delicious Library as a web app. In fact I'd venture to say it's the best way to do it.

I'm sure we'll see some of the solutions from Apple and approved third parties, including support for Bluetooth GPS, voice recognition and voice feedback (Apple has a long history in this arena). Games are coming for sure.

Steve and Co. said "not yet" recently in interviews. Yes, they shouldn't have made such a big deal of the web development possibilities for the iPhone at the keynote. But this is just another one of those little things that give the bloggers something to chomp about for a few weeks.

ATT probably had more than a few words to say about open third-party development on the iPhone.

Apple pretty much stated you will be able to add free and paid upgrades to the iPhone. With regards to the iPod, Apple have also provided far more support for it and updates than most other companies for their own players, with a couple of exceptions.