Santa IPhone… Here is my Christmas List

With the IPhone, there is not that much that I really want.  However, there are two things that I REALLY want.  First… I WANT TO DEVELOP FREAKIN’ IPHONE APPS ON MY PC!  I would love to be able to write IPhone apps, but I make my living as a Microsoft .NET developer, there is no way in heck that they are going to “convert” me using the IPhone.  They should be jumping in joy in my first ever Apple purchase.  Now support me in my desire to build applications for THEIR PHONE, helping them get MORE users of THEIR PHONE.

Secondly… I want Silverlight to run on the IPhone.  If they give me this, then I will be fine with not having the first one.  🙂  Because I will just write my apps in Silverlight.  The issue I see here is that they like their little monopoly called the AppStore, and if they enable Silverlight, then that will allow applications to be built outside the AppStore.

I don’t think I will get either for Christmas… oh well.  🙂  I still can ask eh?

Where’s the Task Manager? Out of Memory on iPhone

My iPhone is my first Apple purchase (at least that I can remember).  I am a Windows guy and have been since way back in my college days when I was into Unix.  But anyway, today when I was just chugging along on my iPhone and I got an “Out of Memory” error, I was like, “uh oh, better close some processes.. how do I get to the task manager?”  Okay, I didn’t really look for the task manager, but I did go to settings to see if there was a listing of applications in memory to clear out like in Windows Mobile.  I found nothing.  So… I did what any other Windows user would do, I rebooted the phone.  🙂

This is not required, Apple did build in a mechanism to free up memory from an application (though it is the first time that I feel that Windows Mobile’s user friendliness has got one up on the iPhone).  To “force quit” (apparently that is what the MacOS users call it) an application on the iPhone, open that application and hold down the home button for 6 seconds.  The iPhone will then kill that app and release its hold on memory.

The only thing I really dislike about this is that there is no way for me to know WHAT apps are holding memory.  I did some basic searching in the Apple Store and figured I would find an application that did that, but I did not.  So as far as I know, I will just be holding the home button down whenever I am done with bigger applications.

Develop iPhone Apps from Windows?

I am new to the iPhone, I just got mine last week, and I am in love with it.  It is in fact, the first Apple merchandise I have ever purchased in my lifetime, or at least since I can remember.  Anyway, being the developer I am, I want to build applications for it!  But what is a Microsoft centric developer using Windows Vista supposed to do?  Well, as I have been told, cry, because development is limited to only Mac OS developers.  However, there is a small amount of light.  I have not had a chance to check it out yet, but apparently David Supuran over at iPhoneGameOver Wiki has put together an iPhone Binary Toochain Installer for Windows users, complete with installation instructions. If anyone has a chance to try it out, please let me know how it goes.  I will of course post my results when I have a chance to try it out as well.

Hat Tip: http://tinyurl.com/5h547o