I’m a defender of most things Mac. I love my Macbook Pro and my iPhone 3G. However, my patience is wearing thin with Apple and it’s handling of updates and features that loyal owners have pleaded for since the release of both the 1st generation and 2nd generation phones.

Push Notification
This is the big one. Push Notification is supposed to allow background notifications of events like new Twitter messages, IMs, eBay bid updates, Facebook status updates, etc. Apple announced it would be available by September 2008. It’s still not here, but the worst part is that Apple has not said a freaking word about where it stands – for all we know, it’s been shelved. How can something this big, affecting millions of customers, and being offered by a publicy-traded company not be discussed by the company after a four month delay?

Video
Video recording for the iPhone has been around awhile. Qik has been running on jailbroken iPhones for months and there have been rumors that it was coming to the App Store for a while. So where is it? Why do we even have to rely on a third-party solution to handle something while the company that makes the phone is itself a giant in video media (Quicktime, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, video editing studios everywhere).

The Rest

• Cut & Paste – I’m not all that worked up over cut & paste, but a lot of people are.
• Running 3rd party GPS apps without the display being on. This is a big battery hog and a pain in the ass.
• GPS apps with LOCALLY STORED MAPS. It’s ridiculous to expect that we’ll always have data access thru the cell network whenever we want/need to access GPS.

I’ve been avoiding jailbreaking the phone in order to get Qik and some semblance of background notifictions, but I’ve about reached the end of my rope.

I’ve been obsessing over Push Notification (or lack thereof) for the iPhone for sometime now, and I’m not the only one. For me, it’s the missing iPhone feature that will make the phone complete (copy & paste be damned).

It was supposed to be released in September, but we’ve heard nothing out of Apple since the WWDC.

Assuming it does see the light of day at some point, I’m starting to wonder how many iPhone apps will actually be able to incorporate it. If I understand correctly, the Push Notification Service will require a “3rd party” server for sending data to Apple’s servers, which will then send it on to an iPhone that has a persistent IP connection.

The question is…how many iPhone developers have the infrastructure to become middlemen in this data transfer? Are any of the Twitter app developers (Twittelator, Twitterific, Tweetie, etc.) set up to handle this? Facebook and AIM, sure – but I’m wondering if a lot of apps out there might be left in the cold.