Steven Frank puts into words what we’ve all been feeling for almost a year:

It continues to kill me, seeing that iPhone apps are still getting rejected for ridiculous reasons.

The Cocoa Touch platform is so great, and this approval nonsense is so absurd that it’s hard for me to reconcile.

Almost a year now, and Apple still has a stranglehold on the platform. I’m an adult, and I am quite sure most iPhone owners are adults, but apparently there still needs to be someone who decides that I can’t use anything that has as much as a nipple in it on my phone. In the mean time, people I know that aren’t very tech-savvy have heard about the news buzz over strange App Store screwups and get completely turned off.

I’m not afraid of competition to the iPhone. I’d be really happy with a good competitor to keep Apple on its toes. I’m much more afraid, however, that something that is qualitatively far worse (but ‘good enough’) than the iPhone platform comes along and wins out because it’s perceived as being more open and people feel like they can do with it what they want. Which may be some really stupid stuff that Apple doesn’t allow on their store. The platform just needs to be ‘good enough’ and not buried in critical news coverage.

Sounds a bit like the old Mac vs. IBM PC battle for supremacy, doesn’t it? We all know how that one ended.

Apple’s iPhone software 3.0 event came and went without a mention or hint at new hardware. There have been a lot of rumors about a possible new iPhone, and a lot of these rumors assumed a potential connection between this new software for the iPhone and the new hardware, which could be unveiled around the time of WWDC this year.

I posed a question on Twitter earlier today, and since there’s (unsurprisingly) been no mention of it today, I wanted to get my thoughts down on this difficult issue Apple faces when it comes to the future of the iPhone platform. At some point in the future, iPhones and iPod touches will get a better screen, with a better resolution. A good example is the move of Apple’s flagship notebook, the Macbook Pro 17″, from a 1680 by 1050 pixel resolution screen, to a high-DPI (dots per inch) screen boasting an impressive 1920 by 1200 pixels. The screen remained the same size in inches; it just packed a lot more pixels in each inch of screen size.

This happens in the arena of mobile devices as well. Some modern cell phones feature screens with a massive resolution of 800 by 600 pixels; comparably, the iPhone offers a ‘meagre’ 480 by 320 pixels. In the future, Apple will change to a better (not necessarily ‘bigger’) screen, and developers of iPhone apps will face a huge issue: how do we scale the interface?

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The future of web applications is bright. While I use Adobe’s applications a lot daily, I’m by no means a fan of their overpriced and badly designed products. That’s exactly why I am so pleased to see a product like 280North’s Atlas, a type of Xcode / Interface Builder for Cappuccino, their powerful web application framework.

Currently, very intensive, desktop-quality web applications either use Adobe’s Flash, or a very barebones interface that works using Javascript and HTML. I love the latter approach; standards compliant, plugin-less applications fills my heart with joy. It wasn’t really desktop-quality, though, and this is a huge step in the right direction.

I’d love to see web applications like Aviary’s created in this; the Flash plugin makes these great applications sadly unusable on a Mac.

Being in the Bay Area last week was great, as always. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the city of San Francisco, spending most of my time in its downtown area. The big highlight of my trip, however, was being in Mountain View at Mozilla’s offices.

I’ll share some of my impressions from the trip – I even brought home some nice loot. Also read on to check out some great websites and blogs of the people I met.

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I’ll be in California between January 26th and February 2nd, visiting the Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View and working in downtown San Francisco. If you’d like to connect, email me or hit me up on Twitter.

I don’t like year-in-review posts. That’s why I’m taking a different approach.

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