Flutterby™! : iOS developer was just touting to me

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iOS developer was just touting to me

2012-08-23 20:46:10.969742+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

An iOS developer was just touting to me the lack of application interop and data sharing as a good thing for security and ease-of-use.

comments in descending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2012-08-24 17:31:36.141057+00 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, it's not about location, it's about the scriptable (or at least multiple-conditional) way of triggering events.

The particular issue was "When I leave my home, have my cell phone turn call forwarding from my land line", but since the various Android scripting tools let me do things like "and the time is between now and now on this sort of day and ...", I thought it'd be cool to allow the "turn on forwarding" hook accessible from other things.

That'd let you say "if I leave home turn on forwarding, unless I'm going to this sort of event", or do other things that requires checking state beyond just what this app can query from this phone.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-08-24 16:59:25.5636+00 by: markd

For location, there's a system provided API. I assume under the hood it's got shared state so that when you bounce from app to app it doesn't have to do the same work over and over. You can pass data between apps by using app-handling URLs and 'opening' them from UIApplication, but that's a pretty crude hammer.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-08-24 15:26:17.376599+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

The particular was that on Android we've got on(x) and Locale. I can't speak to the former, but on the latter I can tie it to sensibilities in Astrid to have temporal and location based conditionals on my to do alerts.

We were talking about location awareness in an app, and I asked "Does iOS have some sort of interop capability so that your conditionals are only defined in one place?" and he gave some "well, if we follow the User Interface Guidelines it's not like they'll have a different interface for it" which kind of misses the point of configurability and single points and...

But, yes, locking down the device does make it more secure. And, really, most customers don't care if it's less functional.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-08-24 01:47:34.194835+00 by: markd

Goes to show there's idiots in every technical community. It's unix in there, and all sorts of nice (or at least usable) IPC mechanisms we can't use.