As I said, when the phone gets below 20 MB or 30 MB it stops behaving normally. The bugs I've experienced include Safari freezing, text messages not loading, emails not displaying, and general unresponsiveness. I wish the OS would automatically clear more RAM, because it behaves fine again when I manually terminate some processes.

I get a creepy feeling from this too. I've always favored military intelligence over war, and I supported the largest US spy satellite launch last week. But I was hoping our satellite technology wouldn't be flagrantly used to spy on our own citizens, especially for things as mundane as holiday shopping.

I use SBSettings (jailbroken) to display available free memory in my status bar. For applications optimized for both iOS 3 and 4, pressing home does not free up their memory. The apps have to be manually closed using either apple's taskbar or SBSetting's processes view to free memory back up. This is my major complaint with iOS4, my free memory quickly goes down from ~350 MB to under 20 MB unless I manually close apps, and the phone starts behaving poorly at under 20 MB. I constantly find myself using the SBSettings "Respring" function as a fast way to clear up memory.

In other news, Genetically Modified Broccoli Shrieks Its Benefits At Shoppers... http://www.theonion.com/audio/genetically-modified-broccoli-shrieks-its-benefits,18415/ (warning, audio autoplays)

I gave Firesheep a try today, and am surprised how many times my own cookies come up inside it without me directly visiting those sites. My google account came up without me browsing at all -- perhaps one of my firefox add-ons was using it, or maybe google latitude on my phone was triggering it? My facebook account came up when browsing other non-facebook sites as well, most likely from facebook connect. The users could have stopped visiting facebook after getting his warning messages and still had their cookies exposed.

There are plenty of smartphone apps out there too (several on the iPhone at least), which is a really great use of the camera and software at once. They support previous frame overlays, time-lapse, and frame-by-frame deleting and editing, which are a boon for quick creativity.

I'm surprised fragmentation is his choice of argument against Android. There are several things iOS does better than Android, but it's getting harder and harder to develop for iOS because of fragmentation. Hell, it used to be called iPhone OS, not iOS, but now you have to make sure your code works on previous generation iPhones, the 4's retina display, the iPad, and the iPod Touch. Resolution differences, support for multitasking, and camera differences are all getting more difficult to manage!

Thanks for being one of the only posts to actually offer information instead of just rants. I've been wanting this type of access for a long time too. I had a small bank whose web access allowed you to temporarily subtract checks from your pending balance until they cleared. When I switched to Bank of America, I've wished for that feature ever since, and the only option I can think of is to use a greasemonkey script to do it. Bank of America also started charging me fees for not having direct deposit, which is difficult to obtain as a freelancer. I tried creating my own direct deposits with Paypal, but their AutoSweep service is not available for small individual customers, and their API does not include a hook for withdrawals. The problem with paypal too is that they charge so much for each transaction; I would have been charged for every transfer each month. In the end I opened up a second BofA checking account online, ordered new checks and a new debit card, and closed the old one. It was stupid that they made me jump through these hoops when it would have been cheaper for them just to remove the fees. Here's hoping for better access!

In OS X, for simple user interaction I've been having better luck with applescript. It's easy enough to alert and get user input with the "display dialog" command, and then I can run "do shell script" to execute my scripts. I can save them as application bundles, I can give them custom icons, they appear in the dock when running, or I can optionally hide them from the dock with LSUIElement. The ability to run interapplication commands and the UIElementInspector tool is a boon for being able to perform powerful multi-app interactions.

I wonder if this will mean apps like Newspapers will be labeled as "Mature Content" similar to CDs? It still seems absurd and hyper conservative that a newspaper application would have that label, but I guess it's better than the overt censorship that's going on now.

Dibs on Nebraska