Wireless iPad Syncing Is Awesome — Too Bad It Will Likely Be Rejected | Hacker News Reader

Wireless iPad Syncing Is Awesome — Too Bad It Will Likely Be Rejected

techcrunch.com

25 pointsjfi20 comments

I think what I love best about my Palm Pre is that I never have to plug it in to anything, ever. There's a great podcast app that I use twice a day on average, similar to the one Apple infamously rejected, that lets me download them over wifi via RSS, or stream them over EVDO if it pops up when I'm already out and about. Zumodrive's new app means I can stream my entire music library. The Touchstone means I don't even have to plug it in to charge.

I think Apple will figure this out and add it to the device themselves eventually. Cords suck.

I'm sure you're aware - but you don't need to plug the iPhone/Touch in to update Podcasts - those are available over the air.

As far as I know, you can surely download podcasts over the air, but your subscription won't be updated the way they are through iTunes on desktop.

I just checked and couldn't find anything to update my subscriptions automatically from the phone.

iPhone's iTunes will refuse to download a longer podcast over the air; only works on wifi. On my Palm Pixi, I can download/steam anything I want over EVDO.

I don't know what the developers expect to get out of this. Do they think that it hasn't occurred to Apple's engineers that this might be convenient? I think, as with copy/paste and background apps, the issue has been how to implement something like this and not harm the user experience.

I suspect the big thing preventing wireless sync until now has been the lack of 802.11n on the iPhone. Syncing 4 gigs of movies out to your phone on 802.11g has got to be painful (and a realy battery drain).

I, too, would guess that they want some sort of complete solution. It’s still somewhat surprising that we haven’t seen any Wifi syncing for such a long time. Wireless sync has been a rumored “next” feature ever since Apple brought out their first iPod.

And there is some stuff they could sync, even if they don’t want to move gigs through the air. Stuff like new playlists, play counts, calendars, notes, addresses. Heck, even the occasional new music track or podcast up to a certain file size limit. They wouldn’t even need to clutter the interface, showing a little “Connect to your Mac for full sync” status message would be enough.

Sync as implemented by iTunes right now is a really simple concept. If you start talking about partial syncs, you significantly up the complexity. And for what? Avoiding plugging your iPod/iPhone/iPad in to sync while charging.

The real elephant in the room is the need for a PC master to sync from when using an iPad.

Apple might also want to go the cloudy road (which would pretty much solve sync, though probably not real soon when it comes to music and videos which just take up to much space). The only problem with that is that Apple sucks at doing that. Buy Dropbox already! :)

Let me walk a mile in Apple's shoes: If they approve this app consisting of what appear to be a couple of cups connected by networking string, what happens if 10,000 people buy it and some future iPhone or iTunes revision breaks the app.

Does everybody blame themselves for buying the app? Or do they complain about the iPhone?

In two short sentences you've managed insult the developer for doing some good work and making something people want,and insult users by suggesting that can't understand what an app is.

Negging seems to be big in the iPhone developer community.

Look, I wrote a Rails plugin that rewrites your code, placing it in a new location, and hooks the class loader so it finds the new files instead of the old ones. I'm very proud of my work.

But.

It's a hack. That makes it useful for me and my projects, but it isn't a product. It has too many dependencies on things that weren't intended to be hooked the way I hook them. It broke when Ruby 1.9 was released. It broke when Rails 3 was released. Hacks are always fragile, it's their nature.

The description I read talked about an app on the desktop side that pretends to be an iPhone so it can sync with iTunes. That is absolutely, positively a hack, and one that got Palm into hot water with Apple's lawyers. It sounds like it's very fragile and could easily break accidentally with an iTunes update.

Now really, honestly, this is Hacker News. I mean no disrespect to anyone when I characterize their work as being a hack. But the point of my commentis that I can't see Apple wanting a hack on their platform.

Now as to users: HN readers are not a representative sample of iPhone users. Apple goes way out of its way to make simple things that just work. Their market for iPhone is the group of people that don't want to consult a huge list of what works and what breaks when they release an update.

Apple especially don't want to dig themselves into the hole Microsoft created by working so hard on backwards compatibility for Windows. Apps like this are a backwards compatibility nightmare. Right now Apple can do anything they want with the iPhone to iTunes synchronization API by updating both apps simultaneously. Approving this app would end that flexibility.

The one thing I wonder about is disconnecting during the sync. A couple of times I have disconnected iPod Nanos during sync and had to restore them. It wasn't much more than a nuisance, admittedly, but on a slower sync with more data transfer (say 20 or 30 GB of video), the likelihood of disconnects being a problem may become significant.

Devices running OS X handle this completely differently (with a client-client communication mode) and can gracefully handle disconnects. Older iPods used disk mode for syncing where filesystem corruption can be problematic if you unexpectedly disconnect.

And they probably had to make it work without problem for the iPhone, since a phone call can pop up at any time.

Active discussion of this with the developer posting on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/bvzzt/hey_reddit_i_ma...

> You know, Apple shouldn't be thinking about approving this, they should be thinking about buying it and making it a default.

Pretty much sums it up for me.

I have a tangential question - if this app was rejected, what is to stop the developer from setting up a website with the source to download, and maybe a paypal donation link (were he so inclined)? Do you have the pay the apple $99 developer fee to even install an app you developed on your iPhone? Or can you do it as long as you have the dev tools installed? I know this isn't an option for everyone, but is it possible?

If the developer posts an unsigned app, then it should be possible for someone who paid the $99 dev fee to sign the app and install it on their personal phone.

I don't know if it is possible to do without paying the fee though...

jwz posted recently that someone loaned him a key so he could test his own app (daliclock) on his phone. So, I'm guessing no.

It's not. The $99 gets you a code signing certificate which let's you install apps on the device. Jailbreaking circumvents this, and allows your device run any app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com