Solipsism Gradient

Steve Jobs just said (I guess I should say, Real Steve Jobs, hehe) on his blog:

…We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.

…Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. …we believe it is a step in the right direction.

This seems to indicate that the application installer – which will in all probability be iTunes – will check if the application is properly signed. Whether they’ll allow developer-signed apps is anybody’s guess, but I wouldn’t rely on it. (Signed apps is one of the 300 Leopard features, by the way. I’ll comment on the Leopard day announcement in a few days.)

I wrote two weeks ago:
Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

Conclusions:

– the current generation of iPhone/iPod touch will remain closed forever, just like the first generations of iPods; (I was wrong there, and a good thing too!)

– an SDK is likely to come out only after everything (especially the hardware) has stabilized;

So the February OS X version will be the first one with stable, public APIs… meaning current apps, written to reverse-engineered specs, will probably have to be seriously rewritten.

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

– Apple is unlikely to invest efforts into implementing TrustZone in the current generation, unless Moorestown (or whatever else they might adopt in the future) has a similar security feature – and maybe not even then

Now I wonder how they’ll handle such a hypothetical future hardware migration… probably fat binaries, with the “other” executables being stripped out by iTunes when installing an app; this would be the most flexible without upping memory footprint on the phone side.

Update: Seems that Intel and ARM are collaborating on new TrustZone implementations… might that foreshadow TrustZone on Moorestown…?

Now, some people say this proves that Apple is listening to complaints and that they’re changing their original plans; on the contrary, I think this had been the plan all the time, but the Leopard delay also delayed the SDK. Regarding the timing of this announcement, this might be a trial balloon to see if they can minimize the inevitable profit-taking after next week’s earnings announcement. Hopefully that will happen.

Just saw this over at Amazon:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

…

Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

…Start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs.

Pay for the instance-hours and bandwidth that you actually consume.

…Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume.

…etc.

History repeats itself… this is very close to what we used to operate with in my mainframe days. You punched out a job control deck and ran a job that used a virtualized instance of the OS. Later on you’d get billed by so many seconds of actual CPU time, I/O bandwidth, and storage. In fact, my M.Sc.-thesis-to-be (1975, I vaguely remember) was about implementing just such a billing system.

Been some time without a test, so here’s a brief one: What kind of blogger are you? My result:

Update: the test seems to be no longer there, sorry.

Drew Thaler on ZFS: a must read.

Update: response from MacJournals News. I regret not having time right now to look into ZFS pros and cons myself…

Update#2: Drew explains more.

I said previously:
Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…So, keeping things closed for now means the software hasn’t stabilized, and very probably the hardware hasn’t stabilized either.

Here’s more evidence for that…

Erica Sadun over at TUAW announced preliminary results on the iPhone 1.1.1 software:

– Third Party apps run. Kind of. We probably have to recompile many of them for the new frameworks because many of them crash.

– Springboard no longer recognizes DisplayOrder.plist. And the list of “whitelisted” apps (that is, the official Applications including Safari, Photos, Calendar, etc) seems to be hard-coded into Springboard.app

– The 1.1.1 binaries barely work with 1.0.2 – at least not well enough to run the music store without major hacking.

Posted by PhoneDifferent:
PhoneDifferent linked to this post

Apple: Pull iPhone Firmware 1.1.1?

There are some reports that some folks are finding that the 1.1.1 firmware update for the iPhone has been pulled from Apple, and that the most recent version of iTunes is now reporting 1.0.2 as the most recent version….

Rumors say Apple may switch the iPhone main processor to Intel’s upcoming Moorestown.

It’s too early to speculate until details come out, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to hear that Apple is considering this. And it would explain the closedness of the iPhone/iPod touch architecture… after all, once Apple allows third-party apps in, and publishes a toolchain/SDK, they’re pretty much locked into the current architecture, and switching to a new one is a major/slow/costly undertaking.

Consider the previous iPods as a counterexample. Apple has switched architectures there – we can’t even say for sure how often – without any users noticing. With only the UI visible on OS X, and no toolchain/SDK or even documentation of the innards, Apple is free to change things radically between software updates. By all accounts, the 1.0.x software is pretty much a work in progress, and 1.1.1 has probably changed a lot.

So, keeping things closed for now means the software hasn’t stabilized, and very probably the hardware hasn’t stabilized either.

Conclusions:

– the current generation of iPhone/iPod touch will remain closed forever, just like the first generations of iPods;

– an SDK is likely to come out only after everything (especially the hardware) has stabilized;

– Apple is unlikely to invest efforts into implementing TrustZone in the current generation, unless Moorestown (or whatever else they might adopt in the future) has a similar security feature – and maybe not even then;

– the fabled OS X tablet will come out when the new hardware is ready; by that time screens will be ready in the proper sizes; Sony showed an 11″ OLED TV recently, remember…

After several months of tinkering and getting used to the new IB, I just published a first beta of the IB3 plugin for RBSplitView 1.1.4.

Some things haven’t been tested (copy&paste), others don’t work fully (undo), but it seems to work mostly. Please post bug reports in the source forum, or e-mail me. To install, close IB3, unzip the plugin in a convenient location (I don’t think there’s a standard one for IB3), and double-click it.

A full Leopard version will be out around the end of this month, along with source code for the plugin.