Poorly Rendered

This week, Apple had one of their famous announcements. As usual it was on at an unfriendly time of day for me, since I live in the UTC+0700 timezone (meaning it started at midnight on the Thursday/Friday) – but I still stayed awake to watch it. I am a registered iPhone developer and I myself have an iPhone 3G, so I am interested in Apple’s announcements generally, and in particular I am interested in the iPhone OS announcements.

So we have all seen the stuff that was publicly announced, and that is all I am using as source material for this post – as well as some of the online ‘gossip’ sites. I am not breaking any NDAs or talking about anything that is specifically marked as “Apple Confidential” on the iPhone Developers section of the Apple Developers site.

After the event, I have been listening to people complaining about a few items. Specifically, the biggest complaints have been:

1. The new section in the developers’ agreement about only allowing code written in C/C++/ObjectiveC and Javascript to be interpreted by Safari in a web application.
2. The new version of iPhone OS will only support iPhone 3G and 3GS in “summer” and the iPad in “fall”.
3. The headline feature (multitasking) only works on the iPhone 3GS.

I will address these in order.

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Linux has been with us in one form or another for a very long time now. The first ‘real’ distribution of Linux was released over 16 years ago – in dog years that’s 112, and in computer years that’s like … forever.

The first version of Linux that I remember was Yggdrasil, which was released (according to wikipedia) in December 1992. However, the first one that was really usable was Slackware, released in 1993 (again, according to teh ‘Pedia).

Back then, the whole Linux thing was purely for techies.

I was a young programmer who was caught in the horrors of coding for DOS 3.3x and Windows 2, when a friend at work showed me this new operating system that was available for the Atari ST. As someone who was both an Atari ST owner and a total nerd, I thought this MINIX thing sounded fantastic, and got a copy from my friend. Making it boot from my ridiculously-expensive 20MB hard disk, rather than booting from floppy and then mounting the hard disk, took me weeks – but once it was done I could settle down and look at how to write device drivers, and how to use Unix-like system calls. There was no internet available to mortals back then, and the ‘man’ system had not yet arrived in Minix-land.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I was a young programmer caught in the horrors of coding for DOS 3.3x and Windows 3.1, as well as venturing forth into the exciting new world of Windows NT. My friend showed me Yggdrasil Linux running on a PC. This had advantages, in that PCs were by then cheap enough to build from parts, and those parts had become inexpensive enough that you could put a system together for relatively little money.

So I built my first Linux machine.

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