Stuff...

So I got an iPad. I've had it about one month. I've been paying a lot of attention to the talk about how it doesn't do Flash, why it doesn't do Flash, how Apple is committing war crimes against humanity by disallowing applications authored in 3rd party tools etc etc.

As a developer who's spent a good bit of time working on different projects that scale from tiny little machines, to medium sized computers to giant supercomputing clusters (yes, I've been on several of the top 10 of the top500 list, writing software to squeeze performance out of them) I can tell you that flexible tool chains, great documentation, and great support do not always go hand in hand.

My opinion on that is that it's a bit sad that I won't be writing and running Haskell code on a non-jailbroken i(Phone|Pod|Pad) but that that's not a deal breaker for most people. Cocoa is a nice framework, with many years behind it making it great. Objective-C is a pretty cool language, (though I feel they should have kept it simpler, no garbage collection, all this automatic atomic update stuff can be confusing etc). Grand Central Dispatch and the libdispatch stuff is powerful, even in a raw C programming context, though some folks I know don't think it's well served to use it outside the realm of Objective-C. Having suffered programming with threads and locks, (even implementing my own locks on certain platforms) I'd say that this is a big step forward in thinking about concurrency and parallelism by means of organizing program code at a low level.

Yes, when you buy Apple's stuff, it's a bit more about doing things "their way" than doing things "your way". The limits Apple places on the hardware it supports with its operating systems, or the limits placed on programmers via the tool chains, are all really there for 2 reasons (in my opinion).

1. It keeps Apple from losing control of its own platform.

2. Apple can focus their engineering and support efforts on making a product that seemingly "just works" with all supported stuff, because the space of stuff to support is a lot smaller!

To me, neither of these things are inherently "evil", as some folks might like to convince you.

I should note I've used my iPad every day since I got it at least one time/day. To pay for it I began selling some of the stuff I intend not to need anymore, such as my old iPod touch, and my old laptop. So far it's been a great trade!