Paying attention yet, Apple? Your customers are tired of how you treat developers, how you limit our choices, and how you're not delivering the solutions people want... and therefore go looking to the jailbreak community to get them. It's real. You should be paying attention. And if you want to stop the jailbreak, then understand why we feel the need to take advantage of it /before/ trying to slam the door on us.

I, for one, will be letting Apple's response help determine my upgrade/device choices ... as we now have several enticing alternatives coming into the market and Apple will have to put some effort into keeping us and attracting more users.

Wow... the economy of the AppStore has really made people whiny about paying for stuff. As some pointed out elsewhere, IM programs for other platforms come with a pricetag. I remember not too long ago paying $14-30 for similar apps on the Treo, some with a monthly fee to support back-end server operations. No free meal ticket, folks. IM+ might be free /for now/ on iPhone, but it's certainly not free on other platforms. I suspect that's the case now because it's not fully baked (as was BeeJive web for iPhone).

I've personally used all the available options for IM on the iPhone so far and most of them really suck compared to other platforms. The /best/ example I'd seen was BeeJive web, but that had some issues with which I wasn't willing to live (losing sessions each launch, no email of sessions, etc). Those have largely been resolved in this first native release, though having the email workaround for offline notification helps while we wait for Apple to get it's job done with notifications. (And, as an aside, if Android's notifications demo was any indication Apple has it's work cut out for themselves.)

So I have purchased this app, consider the $16 quite normal for productivity and IM apps for mobile platforms. And I find the application quite usable and funtional in this first day of use. I'm someone who spends a LOT of time using IM for a variety of tasks (I have 10 simultaneous logins to a combination of Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Jabber, and Myspace)... and it's working beautifully. AT&T's network is a bit dicey, but the apps seems to be able to handle it pretty nicely.

Took offense? We ALL took offense to that and you should have been laughed out of the pundit space for even thinking that Apple was getting close to achieving what we already can with many different jailbroken apps. Just two I find I am using all the time. Cycorder (which Apple totally freakin' flaked on and you CAN'T do with the SDK) and Snapage (which I use exclusively now as opposed to the joke of the Camera app).

What Apple (and apparently some market watchers) needs to figure out is that they haven't created a developer community by just providing a store. They must burn that stupid NDA (so that developers can, um, like TALK to each other??) and focus on completing the SDK to the point that developers can actually do useful things with it. For example, in the Enterprise space, there are thousands of us waiting on developers to deliver OTA PIM sync capabilities... oh wait... they can't do that because the SDK gives no access to the Calendar. WTF!? I'm sorry Apple... you thought that applications might not want to access PIM data on a SMARTPHONE!?

So until Apple gets it's act together and figures out what most of the rest of the market space knows already (what customers want) then we absolutely need the jailbreak community (Pwnage, as well as the developers who write apps that live free of the imcomplete public SDK). And Apple should REALIZE this, WELCOME these developers, and stop trying to prevent customers from having a source for apps they want and need (some of which are commercial, I would point out) and start doing useful things (like completing the SDK) instead of spending any time trying to prevent jailbreaks.

Well, of course they look like Palm apps. If they're using the Styletap platform (demo, for now) then that's because they're running in a Palm OS emulator. ;) it *is* writing a Palm app. :D

ditto! The reason I've waited on the iPhone is because the built-in applications just didn't do it for me. Third party apps are where it's at. And until someone actually takes the time to get better email and PIM apps written, I have my stable of Palm apps, including ChatterEmail, that are /already/ doing what I want.

The only potential bugaboo here is the revelation that SDK apps won't apparently be able to run in the background. That would severely limit the usefulness of a great many applications, such as Chatter and IM products. So... still waiting on a few details, but this particular item could be a deal breaker for me. How could they do such a lovely SDK and screw it up in such as massively stupid manner??