Though iPhone OS 4′s real potency will come when developers seize the new tools and build multitasking apps that do crazy, crazy things, many of the OS’s inherent secrets are coming to light.
Steve Jobs, personal emailer replier that he is these days, responded to a concerned developer’s email regarding this week’s SDK kerfuffle His (characteristically brief) take: “intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps.”
Apple’s move to ban Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler elicited shrugs from Adobe and complaints from Adobe loyalists. Digging deeper into the OS reveals another, albeit less dramatic slight: Apple scrubbed Google’s name from the new OS’s Safari search button.
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According to this video showing Cydia multitasking and this tweet by a member of the Dev Team, iPhone OS 4.0 has been jailbroken already. Then again, Apple may have left the doors wide open as a pre-launch red herring.
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This is iPhone OS 4 running on an iPhone 3GS. Even though it’s not finished, it’s surprisingly usable – not nearly as slow as iPhone 3 beta running on iPhone 3G last year.
Today Apple added some excellent features to its iPhone platform, so we were forced to update our smartphone beginner’s guide chart. Here it is:
We all know that you can’t run Flash on Apple’s mobile devices. But now Apple is trying to make it impossible – illegal – to develop for iPhones in any other development environment but Apple’s own. Oh boy.
