Finally, a sensible article from the media.

[kdarling]

It seems incredulous that the iPhone development team could write "Alpha-level" software for the initial release over a period of at least six months, if not longer, with 1.0.x and suddenly in 60 days produce clean code with 1.1.1.

Not at all. That's often the way it is. Pieces of updated code can be worked on for many months, before being released to replace old code.

I've worked on systems where, in rush to get to market, we've skipped the time consuming process of abstracting apps from platform - written it all as one big soup. Rebuilding something with the a rigorous level of abstraction is a usually a significant rewrite - maybe that's where we're heading, either with some of the work already done in 1.1.1, or that it's still all to do.

Exactly!

These days, we programmers are rushed for time, and pushed to get something out NOW. Then you have to spend extra time re-doing it later... often radically different.

For example, I'd bet that copy&paste support wasn't on iPhone before, because of the time rush. Now almost everything has to be rewritten.