iOS 4 still fails to deliver several email capabilities key to business users, including zipped attachment management, junk mail filtering, message rules, and message flagging.

What F'd up sadistic moron would push the junk mail filtering, message rules, and flagging down to the client? Wouldn't that mean that each client would be configured separately? I always set up that stuff so the user can configure it at the server level so that their laptop, desktop, phone, etc all are seeing the same exact mailstore. These are probably the same people that considering having "Sent Items" only stored on the actual device that did the sending be the way to go.

I am surprised that all these capability are needed for a mobile client. In particular, i would think corporate would want to junk email filtering at the server, otherwise there would be risk that an individual user might overfilter.

Likewise zipped attachments are something that is used for desktop, but I don't know why anyone would use them on a mobile device, but then I don't see why i get memos in MS Word format instead of PDF. Sometimes the feature bloat drives the bad habits. I suppose that on some mobile devices application installation might happen through email.

I would also like to see message rule and flagging pushed back to the server. I might be using one of four machines to look at mail. Everything is stored on the server. Keeping the rules consistant on all machines can be a pain. It would be much better to be able to set up one server to check mail, then reroute, then all the other machines feed off that. When I used to one machines going all the time at home, this more or less happened.

In any case many of these complaints seem more about wanting to do things the old fashion way rather than genuine functionality. It is like complaining that Python does not have a traditional for...next loop. Get over it.

Yes, all those touch-screen blackberries with the blackberry app store a decade ago were great. You must have installed the first talk-out-of-your ass app.

Please don't try to make sensible posts on Slashdot, it might explode the fanboys heads in the basement.

Also, why is Slashdot always so effin' slow? You'd think you people being such hot-shit IT professionals that you could, maybe, make it run a little faster than a legless turtle?

Really? Why? Please tell me you don't have four hip holsters.

Yes, I did read the rest of your post. No, it still doesn't make sense.

Junk mail, rules, and filtering absolutely should happen at the server level if you are using Exchange or IMAP, and any business still using POP for email is just shooting themselves in the foot for not understanding their tech better.

However, unzipping would be kind of nice. People send attachments to each other all the time, and email servers have attachment limits. New iPhone users will also have limited data bandwidth. It would be nice if someone could send me that file zipped to 20-50% so I could save time. It takes less time to download files than it does to unzip them and in advanced situations with larger files every little bit helps. Granted, you may be correct in that there are better solutions than trying to email me a 250 MB spreadsheet on a device that probably can't display it in a sophisticated manner.

You are indeed an F'd up sadistic moron. Really. Do you carry four pair of pants with you at all times? One for general use and the other three for your major customers. Holy fuckin' shit.

Honestly what Apple have done isn't so much listening to developer's requests as it is fulfilling those requests to the greatest extent possible *without compromising user experience*.

Not compromising user experience, even potentially, appears to be their guiding principle and it's served them well. Slashdot will never love Apple because they aren't the target market. I, like a lot of people who swear by the iPhone - actively want appliance computing when it comes to a smart phone. I actively want the walled gardens of the XBox 360, PS3, Appstore, Wii, and even Steam, because these things substantially reduce malware and/or cheaters. I understand that it is fundamental to the basic principals of a Turing machine that they can never eliminate these things (ie virtual machines, etc.), merely reduce to a level unlikely to affect me. But in practice that's all I need, much like how in practice I only *need* 256-bit TLS for securing online purchases.

The antagonism seen towards Apple on Slashdot is due to the fact that it's an explosively growing market segment that isn't targeted for the core Slashdot demographic. It implies that the world is moving on from them, and nobody likes to hear that.

--Ryv

I agree.

And Calendar appointments too. The default alarm is short, doesn't repeat and completely ineffective.

Some appointments are life-threatening if you miss them: Pick up the kids, tax audit, anniversary...

I've seen plenty of people use Outlook's "Rules", even some relatively non-technical people. One of the problems there is that mail servers (excepting Exchange) don't usually have good server-side filtering along with client-side configuration of that filtering.

I don't bother setting up client-side filtering on my personal email account because it only works if that client, and I don't always check my email from the same client.

I don't bother tagging my email because it's not something that's handled consistently and most of the time it's client-side only. So if I spend lots of time tagging my email and using those tags, and then I move to another client, those tags are all missing. Worse: if I delete my client's settings without backing up the tagging information, all that information simply goes away. Exchange allows categories (basically tags) to be stored on the server-side, but they're inaccessible by mail clients other than Outlook.

Also, I can't send tags. Like if I'm sending an email to my boss and I tag it as "budget", he doesn't get that tag when he receives that email. When he replies, the reply isn't tagged either. It's just not a very well thought out system.

No, you wouldn't be forgiven. Apple did not invent multitasking, and nobody with a brain or a clue says that they did. They also never claimed that it was a bad idea for mobile devices. They said the current implementations were bad for mobile devices in their opinion, and historically there has been support for those claims.

As is evident from copy/paste, multitasking, and several other features, Apple takes the time to get the implementation right and make the features more accessible to a wider audience, and what they trumpet as new isn't the feature, but their take on it. Jobs has said about several such developments, "we're not the first, but we're the first to get it right" or something to that effect. There is room to disagree with that development approach or whether Apple's method really is better for any given personal preference, but the only thing disingenuous about it are people who fail to identify context for the sake of making a snide remark.

That would be silly, there is no need for separate pants for each major customer.

But you do need a separate belt for each belt-clip on each phone... so each belt would need a separate pants.... oh, crap, I guess he does need separate pants ;-)

-Em

"haha, Its funny cuz its true"

Oh please. At the time of System 7's debut, cooperative multitasking was competitive with Windows (which, IIRC, also used cooperative for GUI apps at that point in time). And it was hardly deliberate crippling. If you'd ever bothered to inform yourself about the technical details, you'd know that the use of cooperative in 'classic' MacOS was driven by a number of unfortunate-in-retrospect Macintosh System design decisions dating back to the early 80s. I say 'in retrospect' because those decisions were a consequence of the pressure to ship a fairly sophisticated GUI on a computer which had just 128K RAM and 64K ROM, while needing to leave a significant amount of RAM free for applications. The design compromises forced by these resource limits later got Apple into a nasty backwards-compatibility trap which made it essentially impossible to transition to a preemptive, memory protected environment without breaking every Mac app in the wild.

(They never did solve that trap either, despite years of trying and failing. In the end they could only move forward by leaving legacy binaries behind.)

Spoken like a typical slashbot. Yes, even though the iPhone kernel is the same as the MacOS X kernel and thus obviously supports any form of multitasking you could desire, Apple didn't allow starting more than one app at a time. But they had good reasons to do so, and they have equally good reasons to be careful about how they allow it now. Apple's customers like the end result: a smartphone where they never have to think about silly geeky things like adjusting their multitasking habits to conserve battery life. One man's "reliance on customers' technical ignorance" is another man's "sensible design for people who sensibly don't want to become tech experts just to use a phone".

It's not just Apple, either. Despite the hype, there isn't truly unrestricted multitasking in Android either. But noooo, you've latched onto the evil Apple hurting their customers meme, and mere facts and logic will not get in the way!

...that Apple actually knows what they are doing, considering that they literally cannot manufacture iDevices fast enough for people who are willing to buy them sight unseen.