Nice rant by Charles Arthur.

Apple’s top-down approach to design is a bust when it comes to its approach to the software for the iPhone. Developers for that are up in arms.

People are astonishingly angry at the fact that Apple first won’t let them talk about how to develop for the iPhone – because everything about programming for it remains under a non-disclosure agreement – and second, hasn’t let them get at its most useful application programming interfaces (APIs). Mike Ash, a programmer at the independent Mac developer Rogue Amoeba, has posted a long and annoyed rant about this in which he says that after a month using the new iPhone, with its new software: “I feel like I’ve gone back to the dark ages.” Multitasking is a thing of the past, and it’s impossible for third-party developers to design well, because Apple’s keeping the best parts of the API hidden. Apple can design something that will multitask but others can’t. The developers want in too.

Apple’s constant refrain is that it’s all about making sure the phone isn’t going to be destroyed by applications doing what they shouldn’t. It’s starting to wear thin, though. Palm opened its platform to outside developers, which helped it kill Psion. Apple’s disdain for badly designed outside software is hurting it more than it knows. The developers who were ready to be its friends are turning into its enemies.

So… at last we know…

In an internal e-mail sent to Apple employees this evening, Steve Jobs admitted that MobileMe was launched too early and “not up to Apple’s standards.” The e-mail, seen by Ars Technica, acknowledges MobileMe’s flaws and what could have been done to better handle the launch. In addition to needing more time and testing, Jobs believes that Apple should have rolled MobileMe’s services out slowly instead of launching it “as a monolithic service.” For example, over-the-air iPhone syncing could have gone up initially, then web apps one by one (Mail, Calendar, etc.).

IMHO, the service is still a turkey. (I write as an ‘upgraded’ dot-Mac subscriber.)

Jobs goes on. “It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” he says. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”

There’s a very good article by Joe Nocera in the New York Times about the recurring rumours about Steve Jobs’s health. This is a tricky subject because of the need to balance a CEO’s right to privacy with his duty to shareholders — and to a stock market which is increasingly intrusive. Mr Nocera treads the line adroitly. But his concluding passage is interesting.

It would be horrible if Mr. Jobs had a recurrence of cancer. I hope it never happens. At 53, he is in the prime of his life, the father of a young family. And for the rest of us, it’s exhilarating watching him work his magic in the marketplace. Steve Jobs has created more value and driven more innovation than just about anybody in business. Who doesn’t want to see what he’ll come up with next?

He also, though, needs to treat his shareholders with at least a modicum of respect. And telling them whether or not he is sick would be a good place to start.

On Thursday afternoon, several hours after I’d gotten my final “Steve’s health is a private matter” — and much to my amazement — Mr. Jobs called me. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.” After that rather arresting opening, he went on to say that he would give me some details about his recent health problems, but only if I would agree to keep them off the record. I tried to argue him out of it, but he said he wouldn’t talk if I insisted on an on-the-record conversation. So I agreed.

Because the conversation was off the record, I cannot disclose what Mr. Jobs told me. Suffice it to say that I didn’t hear anything that contradicted the reporting that John Markoff and I did this week. While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than “a common bug,” they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer. After he hung up the phone, it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr. Jobs himself, the very information he was refusing to share with the shareholders who have entrusted him with their money.

You would think he’d want them to know before me. But apparently not.

I’m not overly impressed by most of the Apps currently on offer in the iTunes store, but FileMagnet is an exception. It makes it easy to transfer files from Mac to iTouch using WiFi. Works only for Macs running Leopard. Really neat; and useful already.

(Thanks to Kevin Cryan for spotting that the link as originally provided was duff.)