this is the funniest slashdot comment i've seen in a very long time

I've used the local storage features and they're great. Even made a simple hash store based on it. But you're still stuck in the browser, so the user experience isn't quite as good as a native app. Also, you have all of the overhead of the browser, so even the leanest and meanest Javascript will have a hard time keeping up with the speed of a native app. At least, that has been my experience with the iPhone and Mobile Safari.

But it's definitely moving in the right direction, especially when you throw in CSS-driven animation (which is sadly slow on the iPhone).

And I clicked it without even looking. Shame on me. :(

Twitter's pretty handy if you want to search about something that's happening *right now* and hasn't had time to be blogged about and then indexed by the search engines. For instance, there were several helicopters flying overhead and none of us knew what was going on, so we searched Twitter and discovered that someone was filming a scene for a movie.

It's a nice UI with no driver issues and a unix terminal. That's the only reason I switched.

Objective-C does have garbage collection, but it's not available for use on the iPhone (at least not yet...maybe when the vast majority of iPhones are at least 3GS speed they'll allow it?)

It's kind of ironic that the research team is also studying how to design computer voices for cars.

I'm more of a fan of languages like Ruby than I am Java, but if you really want to run Tomcat, it might not be a bad idea to move to a VPS like Slicehost and install it yourself. You'll get much better performance than any shared host too.

I wouldn't expect iPhone apps to break across the board, but there would likely be issues with custom UI elements.

I completely agree with you, and I'm looking forward to a better Android platform in the future.

Exactly. Eclipse was my IDE of choice when I was building J2EE web apps back in the day. It's really the Android stuff that's so slow.

Thanks! I'm glad you love the app! :)

I am concerned about what will happen when iPhone goes device independent. The UIKit widgets should be fine, and hopefully my custom ones will be fine too, but I'm more concerned about images (for instance, the OS logos in the Slicehost iPhone app).

And yeah, I like them both really. I think they're both fantastic platforms. The Android Market is wonderful though. I had a bug with the Android app and I was able to push it out as soon as I finished it, which was lovely.

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I shouldn't have listed Java, as I have no problem with the Java language; it's really Eclipse that bugs me and only because it (and the simulator) are so slow on my (fast) machine.

And all of the Android UI design tools I've used have been extremely awkward when compared to Interface Builder. In fact, I gave up on the tools and decided to simply write XML by hand (and only then could I finally get the results I wanted). As for IB being closed source and proprietary, that doesn't really matter much to me as I simply want to build the best UI possible (and IB's output is actually extremely verbose XML). I love open source and use/build plenty of it, but ultimately I'm going to use what I think are the best tools regardless of price or openness.

If Apple made a iPhone OS device with different resolution, I might be screwed. But in that case, I'd rather redesign the app to fit the specific device and its nuances, so that doesn't worry me so much. Ultimately, it's a difference in philosophy. The iPhone approach is more like native app design, and the Android approach is more fluid like web design. Both are good in different ways, but I personally prefer the precision of the iPhone OS approach.

As for Core Animation, it's great because it's very simple and intuitive. You can create very sophisticated animations with very little code. In fact, you can do the same kind of morph effects that you see in Javascript libraries like script.aculo.us and and jQuery, which is so easy. Maybe it's that easy in Android too, but on first glance it didn't seem to be to me.

Just so you know, I don't hate Android, and I will probably write another app at some point. If the iPhone wasn't out, it would be my phone of choice, and I think the openness of the platform is great, and publishing to the Android Market is drastically better than the App Store approval process.