What are Public Records?

There are many Public records created by government bodies.

However, the concept of Public Records was created before the internet. In the old days, there was some effort involved in accessing a Public Record - eg go to the Government Organization, and search for it, or pay somebody else to do it. And from an indexing point of view, were complex searches even available? For example, say I wanted to find all property owned by a given person - that might involve trips to many government bodies.

In the internet age, a surprising amount of information is incredibly easily available. eg - find the owners of houses in the smart part of Broadway in San Francisco.

Is this really what was intended by making records public?

Design Decisions of the iPhone

The design and implementation of the iPhone took some fairly controversial decisions. Decisions that are contrary to conventional wisdom. After reflection, I feel that most of these decisions are correct.

The areas I want to cover are buttons, flashing lights, multi-tasking, app approval process, garbage collector.

Buttons

iPhone has a very small number of physical buttons - On/Off switch, "Home" button, Volume button and mute button. An old Windows Mobile Phone has 11 buttons, plus an entire keyboard. I find that mixing the user interface across the touch screen and buttons becomes confusing. You become focussed on performing the next action on yhe touch screen, and forget that you have to use the physical button.

Flashing LED Lights

No flashing lights on the iPhone, 2 on the Windows Mobile Phone. We don't need those ugly flashing lights.

Multi Tasking

"Conventional Wisdom" says that you have to have multi-tasking - it's a modern Operating System. This is where I think conventional wisdom has it wrong. The apps running in the background are consuming memory, CPU cycles and battery life. As a user, it is very difficult to manage that. I had problems on the Windows Mobile and the Android attempting to identify and kill processes. I've no idea how a civilian could deal with this. On the iPhone, the running app essentially gets all the memory and CPU, resulting in predictable behavior.

App Approval Process

Controversial, but I feel that I as a user have benefited.

• Single, consistent place to download apps
• Generally consistent and quality apps
• I can trust that the apps are not going to pull in crapware or viruses

I've got to say that the Android App Store is nowhere in comparison

Garbage Collector

The iPhone applications are written in Objective-C. The latest version of Objective-C has garbage collection built in. The version of Objective-C used for the iPhone does not. Why is that? Probably to save power - ie no need to have a garbage collector thread running. But another reason - I feel that it raises the bar for the competence of a programmer needed to create an iPhone app.