MarkdownMail for iPhone and iPad allows you to write articles in the Markdown format. You'll then be able to export the markdown in an email or send beautifully formatted HTML emails from the app itself. For those who aren't familiar with what markdown is, let's cover that first. Markdown is a markup language created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz. It's extremely easy to learn and extremely convenient and efficient for publishing online. Markdown will basically convert your content into valid and properly formed XHTML. You don't have to deal with HTML tags and code. Markdown will take care of that for you.

Read on for a quick walkthrough of MarkdownMail which is currently available for both iPhone and iPad.

[iTunes Link]

MarkdownMail is a very simple app that looks like a plain note pad at first sight. In reality, it's so much more than that. I've actually started using MarkdownMail to write a majority of my content for TiPb. The language itself is extremely easy to learn. John Gruber has a Markdown Syntax guide on Daring Fireball that's extremely easy to follow. It was only a matter of an hour before I was able to punch out articles in MarkdownMail on my iPad and publish well formatted articles without the hassle of writing in actual HTML. I'd highly recommend anyone that publishes frequently online to learn markdown, as it is much cleaner and makes editing dead simple.

As for MarkdownMail itself, you will basically type all of your content in Markdown language. You can also preview as you go. So if you aren't sure of the syntax, try it and then preview. There is also a built in syntax reference shortcut that will take you directly to John Gruber's guide online.

When you're done writing content, you can choose to email the article as an HTML document, which is great if you'd like to send an email with bullet points or emphasis. I've used this feature for work emails and outlines. Alternately you can choose to just copy the HTML code to the clipboard and paste it wherever you'd like.

When publishing articles, I simply choose to email myself the markdown version. This way I can simply copy and paste it. Then all I've got left to do is embed images and video. It allows me to write wherever I want, whenever I want. One thing I do wish Markdown supported was accounts. It would be nice to sign in to an account within the app and have it bring in the same articles on my iPhone that I am working on from the iPad. This would give me even more freedom to write. It may be an unrealistic request but if it did happen, I'd be in markdown heaven!

Pros

• Dead simple interface
• Several export options when it comes to what you're doing with your content
• Built-in syntax reference guide for the markdown language
• The app is a universal binary, so you can download on iPhone and iPad with one purchase

Cons

• Would be nice to see a way to sync your markdown content across devices
• Folders to sort drafts into categories would be a welcome addition

Why are there no Clock, Calculator, Voice Memo, Weather, or Stocks apps on the iPad? Because Steve Jobs didn't think they worked on the larger iPad screen, according to Daring Fireball's John Gruber.

It’s not that Apple couldn’t just create bigger versions of these apps and have them run on the iPad. It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or at least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who.

Gruber was responding to theories that these apps would instead be offered as App Store downloads, or could be part of some secret widget dashboard implementation. In other words, that it's a design issue, not a technical issue.

However, new UI that would make the iPad an amazing bedside clock (how's that for a Lock Screen), or show Stocks with a variety of graphs and related news and data, or weather for several days and cities at once, certainly seems possible for Apple's UI wizards. Perhaps they simply lacked time to re-do the apps for the already extended April 3 release date?

Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps. At least that’s the story I’ve heard from a few well-informed little birdies.

Speaking of which, any little birdies hear anything about an iPhone 4.0 sneak preview event yet? Or is everyone just focused on getting the iPad out right now?

Source: Daring Fireball

I've mentioned a couple times already, given the recent flare-up in the discussion about iPad and iPhone not supporting Flash, that not so long ago you had a hard time using any browser other than IE6 because of another proprietary plugin -- Microsoft's ActiveX. Times change, though, and these days Firefox, Safari, and Chrome users seldom if ever come across the big red X. It's possible Flash and its blue lego block will soon be likewise optional on major sites.

Scobleizer draws the same analogy:

Let’s go back a few years to when Firefox was just coming on the scene. Remember that? I remember that it didn’t work with a ton of websites. Things like banks, e-commerce sites, and others. Why not? Because those sites were coded specifically for the dominant Internet Explorer back then.

Some people thought Firefox was going to fail because of these broken links. Just like Adobe is trying to say that Apple’s iPad is going to fail because of its own set of broken links.

But just a few years later and have you seen a site that doesn’t work on Firefox? I haven’t.

What happened? Firefox FORCED developers to get on board with the standards-based web.

The same thing is happening now, based on my talks with developers: they are not including Flash in their future web plans any longer.

I work in web development and just did a major site redesign for an international company. It went from a lot of Flash, to no Flash. Why? Marketing wanted a site that would be more easily viewed on BlackBerrys and iPhones.

Daring Fireball drives this home:

Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”. Adobe’s own statistics on Flash’s market penetration claim 99 percent penetration as of last month. That’s because, according to their survey methodology, they’re only counting “PCs” — which ignores the entire sort of devices which have brought about this debate. Adobe is arguing that Flash is installed on 99 percent of all web browsers that support Flash, not 99 percent of all web browsers.

Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.

Daring Fireball has an interesting post up regarding the continued lack of a Flash Player for the iPhone, and the reasons why Flash support for the iTablet/iSlate/iPad is unlikely:

I’ll leave the last word to Apple COO Tim Cook, who a year ago said, “We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.”

Flash is owned and controlled by Adobe.

Gruber breaks it down into several broad strokes.

• According to Apple plugins in general, and according to sources at Apple, Flash in particular, is the leading cause of crashes on Mac OS X.
• In order to make a 64-bit version of Safari on Mac, Apple had to create a new plugin architecture because Adobe (still) only makes 32-bit Flash and since Apple has no control of the Flash code, they have to work around it.
• Flash is the only remaining major web technology that's proprietary and controlled by one company, which is not good for the web, and if Apple can't control something, they'd rather it be non-proprietary.
• Flash performance on Mac OS X is poor compared to QuickTime. Adobe would like to address this via direct hardware acceleration, Apple would rather developers use the existing, higher-level QuickTime APIs.
• Flash is used as a runtime, which Apple doesn't support on the iPhone.

I'll add two more things to this list, especially applicable to the iPhone:

• Flash is an increasingly large target for malware attacks. While Apple is slow to respond to zero day exploits, Adobe is as well. The idea that Apple would have to wait on Adobe to patch an iPhone exploit is likely not appealing to Apple. Imagine how long iPhone firmware updates would take then?
• Flash is privacy hostile, allowing sites to store "Flash cookies" which can restore deliberately deleted browser cookies and otherwise track user data. That Adobe still doesn't better inform their users, and relies on an obscure website to provide controls is troubling to say the least. (That page is supposed to contain site-specific permission for Flash to access webcams. Mine contains entries for major online media sites and e-commerce stores).

Apple believes control helps them create the best user experience. It's incredibly frustrating at times, but it's how they've built their business and arguably attained some of their success.

I don't believe for one moment Apple is pushing open standards over Flash for altruistic reasons. In this instance, however, their reasons happen to coincide with what's better for the web. They're also are one of the few companies powerful and popular enough to push HTML5 video.

The iPhone and quite possibly the iTablet are their best shot at doing that.

Daring Fireball received a response from Apple Senior VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, regarding the App Store incident involving the Ninjawords iPhone dictionary app.

Gruber quotes "the salient parts" of the email in full, but the gist seems to be that, unlike other dictionaries approved for the App Store, Ninjawords drew from Wiktionary -- an open internet source -- and thus the App Store suggested they wait until iPhone 3.0 was released with parental controls before re-submitting it. Not knowing the release date of 3.0 and not wanting to wait, the Ninjawords developers went ahead and filtered it themselves, thus ending up with a filtered app that took long enough to approve it timed itself into the 17+ rating anyway.

However, other dictionaries with the same "objectionable content" haven't been flagged as 17+, so the capricious nature of the App Store -- the very thing developers fear most -- remains. Check out the above link to Daring Fireball for more on that aspect.

For his part, Schiller closes his response as follows:

Apple’s goals remain aligned with customers and developers — to create an innovative applications platform on the iPhone and iPod touch and to assist many developers in making as much great software as possible for the iPhone App Store. While we may not always be perfect in our execution of that goal, our efforts are always made with the best intentions, and if we err we intend to learn and quickly improve.

On the heels Tim Cook's comments about improvements needed to the App Store, if observable actions follow the sentiments, perhaps developers and users alike will begin to regain some faith in the approval process. Until then, it remains an unsightly blemish on Apple's otherwise brilliant mobile platform.

(No word yet on whether Gruber asked him about Google Voice...)

Palm faithful rejoice, Gizmodo -- via an unnamed source -- claims that Palm Pre still syncs with iTunes 8.2 release, same as it reportedly did with the pre-release version.

Meanwhile, Daring Fireball weighs in on the situation again, this time wondering if what Palm is doing is illegal, and if Apple stops it, whether that would be illegal. PreCentral.net, for their part, looks beyond the what to the why:

we're increasingly getting the feeling that Palm is either trying to goad Apple into a legal showdown or they are so confident in their patent portfolio that they feel they can throw these features in Apple's face.

To which Gruber aptly footnotes:

And, when judging the likelihood of Apple filing such a lawsuit, consider the perspective of a certain highly-competitive quasi-paranoid Apple founder and CEO who is famously sensitive to what he perceives as being “ripped off”. The one and only company to ship a product that successfully masquerades as an iPod via USB is the company whose engineering division is run by a former Apple senior VP and has hired a slew of former Apple engineers.

In -- as they say -- deed.

Daring Fireball has been looking into Google's new Gmail WebApp for the iPhone and the technologies behind it. We already know the iPhone packs a version of Apple's Safari Web Browser which is, in some ways, even more advanced than desktop Safari on the Mac. SQLite database caching, for example, for example users continue to archive or star messages even when there's no internet connection. What's more interesting to him, us -- and likely users -- is how that technology improves functionality.

Says Gruber:

I use the native iPhone Mail app to read email on my iPhone, but I’m tempted to start using the Gmail web app for one reason: I waste a lot of time switching back and forth between Mail and Safari after tapping a URL in an email. When using the Gmail web app, tapped links simply open in a new Safari tab. The iPhone Mail app needs a built-in web view, like what most popular iPhone Twitter clients offer.

Google's Alex Nicolaou has blogged about the process.

We once wondered what the future of WebApps would be in a post-native apps world. Looks like Google expects -- and is out to prove -- things still look very bright.

Anyone else considering ditching the built-in mobile Mail app for some web-based Gmail?

Someone told Daring Fireball that Apple not only asked Google to remove the multi-touch from the Android/HTC T-Mobile G1 smartphone, but also to remove the 3.5mm headphone jack.

The first part was reported earlier and makes the kind of sense that only tricky mega-corp coopetion can make (iPhone eyeballs are more valuable to Google than the G1's multi-touch at this point). The second part... not so much. Specifically, Daring Fireball's source mentioned Apple's use of the remote buttons on the headset to control media playback as the reason for Google avoiding the jack entirely on the G1. (Note: while this sounds familiar, a Google search didn't turn up any links for Apple patenting anything associated with such processes, so if anyone can point us towards that info, please let us know in the comments).

Other smartphones have long used the 3.5mm headphone jack, and since the G1 is hardly a media powerhouse (it doesn't even include a built-in video app), there's little reason to believe HTC couldn't have included a non-remote, standard 3.5mm jack.

(Aside: Our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, has managed to confirm that both the BlackBerry Curve 8900 and Pearl both make use of some type of headset based media control, so there we go...)

Chris Ziegler over at Engadget Mobile weighs in, calling the entire Apple/Google story from VentureBeat FUD, and the sourcing on the 3.5mm piece sketchy, and while admittedly an unnamed Android source, absent corroboration, doesn't pass the traditional media test, here's the other thing:

HTC seems to love the ExtUSB in lieu of 3.5mm headset jack. It's not just the G1, but an increasing array of their smartphones that are -- and will be according to the 2009 HTC roadmap that was leaked -- abandoning 3.5mm for the ExtUSB.

So, we're not sold on this story yet, how about you? Does it seem likely Apple talked Google out of a 3.5mm jack, or that HTC just plain doesn't like them and never considered it?

I must admit, I've stopped using NetNewsWire on my iPhone because I've just found it unmanageable. What was an awesome fire hose on my Mac just threatened to drown me on the much smaller machine. Enter Daring Fireball's John Gruber with some awesome tips on making NetNewsWire on the iPhone far more functional:

What I want in an iPhone feed reader isn’t just a little bit different than what I want in a Mac feed reader, it’s a lot different. So what I did last week was start over from scratch on the iPhone. Rather than going through my full list of feeds and turning some off, I turned them all off, then went through and re-enabled about 20 feeds — the ones I like best, with the highest signal-to-noise ratios, and which would be most enjoyable in those I’m bored, give me something to read moments.

Now NetNewsWire is both snappier for him and more relevant to a mobile experience.

I tried it and I'm loving it. If you give it a try, let me know how it works for you!

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Background Reading

• Review: Naked Case Touch-Through Acrylic Case
• Review: iPhone OS 2.2 Software
• The 2nd Gen iPod Touch is Faster than Your iPhone 3G
• Safari's New Look (Daring Fireball)
• How To: Get Our iPhone Podcasts Over the Air
• Want Japanese Emoticons? Hack Enables Them On Any iPhone 2.2
• David Pogue Downgrades BlackBerry Storm to a Depression (NYT)

Ultimate iPhone Accessory Pack Contest

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Credits

Thanks to the the iPhone Blog Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat, or sent in questions!

Our music comes from the following sources:

• I Called You -- iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy
via Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge

UPDATE: iPhone dev extraordinaire Erica Sadun investigated over at Ars and found the following: Google is both linking to Private Frameworks and using unpublished APIs. While the latter is likened to jaywalking, the former is apparently a ban-worthy offense. Yikes. Check out her complete investigation for more. And now that it's public, the question shifts to what if anything Apple will do about it? Cave to Google over a killer feature and betray the confidence of other developers, or yank Google's app, alienating a huge (if guilty) partner and likely creating another furor among users?

Original post:

Is Google using private (i.e., not publicly available via the official iPhone SDK) APIs to create the silky-smooth "raise the phone and talk" activation for their new Advanced Voice Search feature in the update Google Mobile App? That's the latest question Daring Fireball's been looking into, and here's what they've found so far:

If you use something like the command-line strings utility to examine the UIKit framework, you can see that there’s an undocumented (and therefore private to Apple) method named proximityStateChanged. And if one were to strip the FairPlay DRM from the current Google Mobile application binary — which, of course, you wouldn’t do, because you’re not supposed to strip FairPlay DRM, but I’m just saying if one were to do this — a class dump of the application binary would show that Google Mobile does in fact implement proximityStateChanged.

DF posits three possible explinations: 1) No one at Apple noticed the private API usage, 2) Apple noticed but turned a blind-eye, or 3) Apple approved the use of a private API. Citing sources, DF claims #3 to not be the case, and perhaps that's why Google promoted the feature so heavily, and stirred up interest so high Apple would feel pressure to approve it (though we wonder if Steve Jobs' Apple ever feels that type of pressure?)

By contrast, DF states #1 is not without precedence, while #2 would be grossly unfair to other developers, and either way, users may suffer if Apple makes changes to their private APIs (which is one of the reasons to keep them private after all).

So what do you think? Which scenario is most likely? And what would you rather, that developers (Google or not) use officially unsupported features if it means better apps but also apps that might just break when the next firmware drops?

UPDATE:

The New York Times gets clarification from Opera (via Daring Fireball):

“We stopped the work because of the prohibitive license,” to Mr. von Tetzchner wrote in an e-mail.

Turns out it was an internal project.

ORIGINAL POST:

So we, along with half the interwebs, picked up a paraphrased comment by Opera's president that pretty much indicated Apple had rejected popular mobile browser Opera Mini from the App Store.

Well, John Gruber over at Daring Fireball did some digging and found out that it just ain't so:

My understanding, based on information from informed sources who do not wish to be identified because they were not authorized by their employers is that Opera has developed an iPhone version of Opera Mini, they haven’t even submitted it to Apple, let alone had it be rejected.

On Monday, TiPb Senior Editor Dieter Bohn debuted his new bi-weekly feature, TiPb of the Avalanche, by asking about the iPhone App Store and the "Long Tail" business model.

Looks like he's not alone. PCalc developer James Thomson (via Daring Fireball) recounted his struggles with Apple's new policy of listing Apps by original release dates, ignoring update dates, and forcing older Apps to the frozen hinterlands of the last few pages in a list growing well past 5500. Under the old model:

Sales started to slow down over time, but with each of the 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 updates they went back up into the stratosphere as PCalc moved to the front page of the Utilities section again.

And now?

As it stands, the App Store is too crowded to find anything if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for by name.

So while, according to Apple Insider, the App Store may still be climbing faster than iTunes Music did, GigaOm is pishing the posh on the iPhone bump in general.

During Apple's Q4 conference call, Steve Jobs said that the App Store would reach 200 million downloads today spanning over 5500 Apps in 62 countries. How will Apple's (continuing?) tweaks on App Store organization help or hinder developers moving forward? And will they, as Dieter is suggesting, have to start putting as much time, money, and effort into marketing as they do coding? Or are there no easy answers?

During Tuesday's "Spotlight on Notebooks" Keynote, Steve Jobs wasn't the only jean-and-dark-shirt uniformed Apple exec on stage. COO Time Cook took an unusual turn, discussing Mac business. SVP of Design, Jonathan Ive, an even more unusual presence in front of the audience, introduced the new "brick" unibody concept. And Marketing VP Phil Schiller -- who's no stranger to Keynotes -- took part in the Q&A at the end.

It wasn't all Steve, all the time.

Because of this, Gizmodo's Jesus Diaz says Steve may be thinking of leaving in the near future, to live out his days on the beach, content that he's shown investors and customers that Team Apple will Boom! along quite nicely without him, much as Microsoft is... er... doing without Gates in the daily driver's seat:

Steve Jobs is leaving Apple. Not tomorrow, but probably very soon. That's why he started to say good bye today, doing something more important than just presenting new MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and an updated MacBook Air. Today's event was a play in which he clearly told everyone that the company is more than himself. Since the very first minute, when he immediately sat down to let Tim Cook talk, he was saying: "Hey, look, Apple is more than Steve. These are The Guys, the Goodfellas, the A-Team. They share the same vision I have. And they are going to push the company forward when I change my office chair for a hammock and caipirinhas on my private beach in Hawaii".

Daring Fireball's John Gruber, however, says Steve isn't going anywhere. He points out that Jobs has shared the stage before, often letting adepts take the more highly specialized presentations, like introducing Leopard at WWDC. Gruber says:

But so long as he’s healthy, working at Apple is exactly the thing Jobs wants to do. He’s consumed by his work, and I think it’s only in the last two or three years that Apple has gotten to the point where Jobs feels he has a decent set of crayons at his disposal. In Jobs’s mind, the iPhone is only the beginning of what a truly flourishing Apple can produce. Why would he leave now? “A hammock and caipirinhas on a private beach” would be living hell for Steve Jobs.

We're with Gruber on this one. While Diaz is saying what many of us were likely thinking during the show, Jobs doesn't strike us as the casual CEO. His investment in Apple is lifelong. He's not Woz, he's the Wizard, and they'll have to pry his hand off Apple's perfectly balanced, aluminum and gloss black steering wheel if that's ever going to change.

Daring Fireball has posted an interesting article that focuses on trust-issues developers have with Apple's current App Store approval process. In a pod-shell, they can't depend on Apple not to reject Apps they've invested time and money on, hence they are reluctant to develop the kind of Apps that require time and money, which are typically just the kind of innovative, mind-blowing Apps we really, really want them to develop and Apple not to reject. While DF's solution is both simple and profound, it's an analysis of just why Apple may have rejected PodCaster and MailWrangler, the two Apps whose rejection made manifest this developer fear:

The theory is that there is an unpublished rule that Apple — and in this case, where by “Apple” I really mean “Steven P. Jobs” — will not publish third-party apps that compete with or replace any of the four apps in the iPhone’s default “dock”: Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod.

Why?

And so my guess is that while there may not be any logic, there’s at least a notion, if only in Jobs’s mind, that these four apps are sacrosanct because they define the iPhone. Everything else, both from Apple and from App Store developers, is piffle, secondary to those four apps.

While I remember there being another issue stated for MailWrangler's rejection: that it didn't allow users to edit their account information, it's impossible to know at this point whether or not fixing that and resubmitting it to the App Store would have gotten the developer any further (though I hope he at least tried?)

What do you think? Could a lot of the current App-angst be traced back to Apple's (and Steve Jobs') holding the iPhone dock applications sacred? And if so, if they clearly stated in the SDK "Thou Shalt Place No Apps Before the Them", would that go anywhere towards calming developer fears, or only increasing their frustration?

Daring Fireball points to this Twitter from Raven Zachary as a reason why developers will put up with Apple's capricious and communication-challenged App Store:

Trism, the $5 gravity/tilt-assisted iPhone puzzle game by Steve Demeter, has made $250,000 since July 11.

We're pointing to DF because they're right.

And for more on the other side of the App Store debate, check out the latest episode of MacBreak Weekly from TWiT, where Scott and Alex take complaining developers to task, pointing to PodcasterGate as something that could threaten Apple's revenue stream if Amazon or another major company sited it as precedence for releasing their own music catcher Apps, bypassing iTunes, instigating Apple shareholder lawsuits, and other corporate level intrigue.

Agree or disagree, all sides of the issue are definitely upping the debate. (And Trism may just have given one side 250K more arguments in their favor...)

Seems it wasn't a hair that broke the blogerati's back, it was an App. Or more precisely, it was Apple's denial of the Podcaster App that let loose the floodgates of negative internet reaction. Or even more precisely, it is the continued lack of certainty among developers as to what can and will be denied by Apple, leading many to reconsider the return on investment of hours upon hours of coding with 11th hour rejection hanging perpetually over their heads, like a virtual Sword of Damocles.

According to Read Write Web, Podcaster will be turning to Ad Hoc to distribute their App for nowwhile everyone from Daring Fireball to Roughly Drafted cover (and in some cases, recover from) the various comments and implications flinging back and forth across the blogsphere, the New York Times has decided to escalate the attention level:

I can’t see how distributing the program will hurt Apple. If anything it will make the iPhone a tad more valuable. On the other hand, treating developers capriciously is most certainly going to discourage them from spending nights and weekends working on new and useful applications that may give more people reasons to buy an iPhone.

Sure, the App Store is growing twice as fast as iTunes Music (though starting from zero is an easy way to generate an opening curve), and may well hit a billion units moved by 2009, but with Android's open marketplace on the horizon, and Microsoft me-too'ing their way in with Skymarket, there could be alternatives. If Apple doesn't take a page from their MobileMe fiasco playbook and rapidly standardize and clarify the rules of the game, they could lose their early lead. And that could cost them the Mobile Internet Platform dominance they so currently crave.

Don't get us wrong. It's Apple's platform and they, like a Nintendo with the Wii, have the absolute right to approve or deny anything developed for their platform. But developers have the same right to stop developing for a platform they don't think serves their best interests. And consumers have the same right to stop buying it for the same reason. As with the Blacklist push-back, that will be the ultimate officiator of this debate.

And a terse one-line email from Steve may not fix things if Apple waits too long...

Om Malik says Apple is clueless about scaling MobileMe:

There is no-unified IT plan vis-a-vis applications; each has their own set of servers, IT practices and release scenarios. Developers do testing, load testing and infrastructure planning, all of which is implemented by someone else. There’s no unified monitoring system. They use Oracle on Sun servers for the databases and everything has its own SAN storage. They do not use active Oracle RAC; it is all single-instance, on one box, with a secondary failover. Apparently they are putting web servers and app servers on the same machines, which causes performance problems.

John Gruber retorts, with the US' #1 online music retailer firmly in his corner:

But the iTunes Store does gangbuster traffic and has a terrific track record for uptime. The message I read from yesterday’s reorg that put MobileMe under Eddy Cue (Apple’s VP for iTunes) is that MobileMe could and should be as responsive and reliable as the iTunes Store.

The crazy thing is, MobileMe should have been an iTunes-learned breeze for Apple in terms of meeting service levels, given their pedigree. But then iTunes uses WebObjects (which I believe is old school Java-based) and MobileMe uses SproutCore (which is all dressed up in Ajax-y 2.0 objectivity), and the pretty much disastrous July 11th launch, which took down both iTunes iPhone activation, and slammed the MobileMe servers into weeks of problems, show something clearly is different with the new kit on the block.

Hopefully Cue will bring some of the iTunes luster to MobileMe, but only time will tell. What do you think? Which blog wins this round?