Java v. iPhone v. Windows Mobile v. Amiga Anywhere

[Trev]

One of these kids is not like the other, and I think we can all safely say which of the four it is. (I would mention Palm or maybe RIM, but that would ruin my Sesame Street analogy.)

If you haven't watched it yet, head over to Apple and take a look at yesterday's Apple Town Hall. The iPhone SDK is neat stuff. (Not necessarily ground breaking, but Apple's got balls and $100M from a US VC firm to help developers get started.) Distribution is similar to Amiga's scheme, but Amiga can't claim 28% market share and nearly universal brand recognition. And let's face it--Amiga Anywhere is years (decades!) behind the competition.

[Trev]

Exactly. Setting aside Amiga's off-shore development house, which could be quite profitable, what sort of bull is Amiga feeding its investors?

My current cell phone supports a small, not too feature rich Java environment. Not much you can do with it. Time for an iPhone, I guess. I have an iPod Touch, so I suppose I can start with that.

[Trev]

I like Apple's hardware aesthetic. "Better" is subjective, I suppose. The still insanely popular Motorola Razr certainly isn't better, and my Slvr has a hard time keeping up with my key presses.

The smart phone competition isn't much cheaper, really. The Moto Q is $440. Nokia's least expensive is $300 (most is $1100!!!). I suppose you can get a BlackBerry (meh) for $100. The iPhone does need GPS, though. Its location awareness via cell and WiFi databases isn't very reliable.

[Trev]

@adolsecent

28% of the smart phone market. This is based on Apple's reckoning, of course. According to Wikipedia and Canalys, Apple's at 6.5% behind RIM (11.4%) and Nokia (52.9%). That's likely do to Apple's selective definition of smart phone--or perhaps Canalys is being too generous. Apple may also be including the iPod Touch in their numbers, as it's a viable target for the SDK and their new software distribution channel.

I agree with you on the price thing. You're not required to get an AT&T contract when you buy an iPhone (in which case it's just an iPod Touch with a camera and speakers), but it would be nice if Apple cut the price a bit for people that did. It's an amazing toy, though, and they've made development (from a Mac, of course) as easy as it gets, including using a consumer iPhone/iPod Touch for source-level debugging across a USB cable. (Microsoft hasn't made it to difficult, and Linux is fine, too, but until recently, it was next to impossible for a consumer to get an SDK for a phone based on Symbian. You wouldn't believe what a pain in the ass it was for me to get my Slvr to allow me to upload Java apps over USB, not knowing the internals of the phone.)

I don't own a smart phone at the moment, primarily because I'm not willing to pay more for monthly cell-based broadband than I do for traditional broadband at home. What I'd really like to hear is AT&T saying, "What, you have our broadband service at home? Then Edge is included." That's not going to happen, of course. The US cell market is a frag fest all around, with consumers as the targets. Just about everything is pay-per-use, even when you think you're paying a flat fee (which is really just pre-paying for a block of pay-per-use services, some of which you may not actually use).

[Trev]

@Hittig

It's where AmigaOS would have been with constant development since 1992.

Sort of. Apple said, "Frak. We can't turn OS 9 into a preemptively multitasking operating system. Hey, Steve. Didn't we buy NeXT from you? How did you guys do it there?" Or something like that.

BeOS was an excellent operating system, already years ahead of Amiga OS, running on a similar platform, and it died. There just isn't enough room in the market for that many competing consumer desktop operating systems.

[Trev]

Apple is a portable media and content delivery company. That whole Mac thing is just a sideline. ;-)

[Trev]

Since by default everything runs as the logged in user rather than root as in Windows, it's just safer

That's not required, but it's something Microsoft hasn't gone out of their way to fix. I believe Vista is attempting to make headway here, but people have mostly complained about how annoying it is--the same way it's annoying to use keys to unlock your house and start your car and pin to access your bank account. Can't please everyone, I guess. ;-)

Windows can be quite stable for real-time application use, including audio and video, but you're not going to get that kind of stability with off the shelf parts. You'd have to buy your system from a hardware/sofware ISV that specializes in those configurations.

I made the switch, too, although Yamaha (my primary keyboard/workstation is a Motif ES8) is a little slow in updating their Mac software. I like the Yamaha keys (which was the deciding factor at the time), but the Motif is a {bleep} to use. Wish I'd bought a Korg. It's moot right now, though. My music room is doubling as storage, so I can't actually get to any of it. :-P (And there's a piano and a couple guitars in the living room, so I'm good to go if I want to embarrass myself in front of my friends.)

[Trev]

@adolescent

Bloodline did say "by default" re: administrator privileges. When you install a consumer copy of Windows, one of the last things it does before showing you the destkop is ask you which users to make administrators.

It's also a bit more complicated than "separate roles," since administrator != root on a Windows system. An appropriate analogy might be system == root, but the system account is not meant to be used interactively. The default object (file system, registry, devices, etc.) permissons on Windows also complicate things--they're more open than they should be, particularly with respect to the Power Users group. There are certain privileges as well, e.g. process debugging, that are as good as administrator access if you know what you're doing.

[Trev]

@adolescent

Agreed. Of course, there are still mainstream Windows programmers writing software with the old APIs (in general, the stuff that doesn't end in Ex and lacks security parameters) or using NULL security descriptors on shared objects. In a corporate world, that means opening up most of the registry and file system. We're talking about consumers though, and what they'll see is something like, "The software installer needs to make a change to your system to allow the software to run properly. Click OK to continue," and Average Joe is going to click OK, blissfully unaware of the changes the installer is making. (Mac OS is no better in this regard.)

I agree with bloodline on the Mac front, but I think a lot of folks use the best tool for the job, be it Mac (Logic, Digital Performer, etc.) or Windows (ProTools--on Mac too, Sound Forge, ACID, etc.). On the PC, though, I think you'll find a lot of folks using dedicated hardware (sequencers, hard disk recorders, etc.), with the PC acting as a simple controller, whereas a Mac becomes a primary workstation.

[Trev]

Re: Smart phones, my mom has an HTC (w/ AT&T), and she's had to replace it three times. She likes the integration with Microsoft Office (Pocket Word, calendar, etc.), which is why she didn't go with an iPhone. It's just too bad the device is terribly unstable.