They probably do not, I cannot say for certain. But I know of designer labels who do - although this fact is not publicised. Really the quality is very good, and if you did not know, you would not guess... So what kind of fashion design do these designer friends of you wife do (If its not clothing)? It might be easier to understand why outsourcing production is not possible if more details were available.

And that's what you get for trying to be helpful... Some people seem to disagree about wedding dresses being designer fashion by the way, a few from Google: http://www.ianstuart-bride.com/ http://www.maggiesottero.com/ http://www.carolinecastigliano.co.uk/ Would you like to email them and tell them they are not fashion designers?

So you agree that it is logistically possible for small businesses, that is progress. So lets address the point about generic and simple: Since when have wedding dresses been generic and simple? The patterns are complicated, have many layers and different fabrics, and everyone wants theirs to be unique.

I know wedding dress designers in the UK that get the dresses made in china and shipped over. It is entirely possible for this to work for a small business. It is even economical to have one dress made and shipped over.

Cant your designer friends get their goods made cheaply in china too? A business is more about customers than supply really. If you have the loyal customers (who buy into the designers vision) they will pre-order unique items that can be cheaply made in china.

But who is to say that even the standard 8bit RGB colour space aligns with the monitors RGB colour space. Surely MPEG colour space will be based on CRTs which have a wider gamut than LCDs in the first place. The extra yellow pixel could be reclaiming some of the colour space lost when moving from CRT to LCD?

Eh? That would mean native iPhone apps that make graphics API calls would also be slow? Sorry don't get your point. Flash (ActionScript) is basically the same thing as JavaScript (same type of language works in the same way, similar syntax). A particular implementation may be slow (badly coded) but that does not mean all implementations will be slow. If JavaScript can do it, then so can Flash. This is definitely a political decision. If Apple wanted flash they could help Adobe produce a good fast implementation on the iPhone, just like they did with JavaScript.

Choice is good, Vendor lock-in is bad. These are the lessons of history, ignore them at you peril. What Apple is doing is good for Apple, it is not good for the consumer nor the developer. The only one who is benefiting from Apples stance on this is Apple. To think that the consumer really benefits from these policies is just post-rationalisation of your purchase decision to buy an iPhone.

This is not possible on Android (Technically you would have to break the flash interpreter, then break the JavaVM, then break the Linux kernel to get one activity to alter another activities private data), as each program runs in its own VM, and each VM has its own "userid". One app cannot affect/infect another. Basically its like a linux system where every app you install gets a new user created to run it. When you start an app Android "logs-in" as that user and runs the app. So android is as secure as a linux system where you cannot su or sudo to root, and every app runs in a separate user account. Kind of like log in as firefox to run the web browser, then start a new x-server and log in as thunderbird on a different virtual console to read your email. For each application you would need to log-in separately and switch virtual consoles to switch between running applications.

Admittedly Flash is not great, but is very much like JavaScript. If the iPhone can technically run JavaScript apps, then it can technically run Flash apps. Anything said to the contrary is political not technical.

If an interpreter is written that complies with the OS4 requirements, all apps running in that interpreter will also comply with the requirements. Likewise I could write a machine emulator that runs on OS4 that emulates for example a SNES, and runs SNES games, and all those would also comply because the VM code itself is compiled with the "smart" build tools. This _must_ be true as all an interpreter or VM is is a program that says "if x do X else if y do Y" where "x" and "y" are the source language instructions and "X" and "Y" are the native code to implement them. If this did not work any code that had "if" statements that depended on run-time information (for example "if user presses key "x" do X" would also not work in this new "magic" framework.

There is no reason the profiling used for objective-c cannot work with other languages... The OS only sees the machine code (as we are dealing with compiled languages). It is easy to see this is true. If I write a python interpreter in Objective-C, the interpreter itself complies with the OS4 requirements, so automatically any python scripts running in the interpreter must also comply. QED. Objective-C is not the best language either, it is not a "standard" in the way C and C++ are standards. Although parts of an app can be written in C/C++, the environment is designed around Apples pre-C++ object-oriented-ish language "Objective-C". The app itself must be written in objective-c but can link to code in C/C++. IMHO Apple should really move to C++ like the rest of the world.

If your app does not "claim" to support a screen size in the manifest, then it will be auto scaled to the original G1 resolution by the OS. There is no problem unless your app claims to support multiple screen sizes and in-fact does not. We develop for both iPhone and Android, and the Android API is the better, and Java is easier to code in than objective-c (due to managed memory). Also I like the fact the DROID/Milestone/Nexus One etc have a much higher screen resolution than the iPhone.

Its actually pretty good value if you compare it to the other Android phones in terms of hardware (for example the Hero is 400 GBP).

The 3G version (with multi-touch) is called the "Milestone" and is available from expansys in the UK.