Why do opera...
Waste their time developing for Apple, when they clearly make it difficult for them?
Opera has developed a version of its Opera Mini browser for the Apple iPad, and it intends to show the thing off next week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The company alluded to the browser with a press release on Thursday morning, saying it will also demonstrate new versions of Opera Mini for Android, iPhone, J2ME …
Developing good software is difficult. So if 'difficult' is the threshold test for doing something then they shouldn't be developing at all.
If you just mean that Apple make it more difficult than the providers of competing tablets then I'd imagine it's because Apple have more users than the providers of competing tablets.
"Developing good software is difficult. So if 'difficult' is the threshold test for doing something then they shouldn't be developing at all."
It's extra difficult when the platform owner applies rules to your product that it doesn't follow itself. Rules which are deliberately designed to cripple your product or prevent it appearing on the platform at all.
And yes maybe they shouldn't be developing at all, at least for that platform. Notably Opera 10.1 (the full one) is on Android, as is Opera Mini, as is Firefox.
The restriction has been eased to permit the interpretation of code that ships with the app (e.g., to allow apps to use scripting code such as Lua). Apple also appear to permit interpretation of user-created data, hence why the C64 app can include its BASIC interpreter again.
However, apps are still not allowed to interpret code which is downloaded from the Internet AFAIK. This rules out apps which use non-Apple JavaScript engines such as Opera's full-fat browsers.
I believe you can still only intrepret code that's in the ipa package. Many modern games have engines written in C++, but a lot of components are chained together in scripts (like Lua). These games would have been barred from the iOS until the restriction was eased. It was good that that let in emulators, but you can't download new programs for your C64 emulator independently of app updates.
India Pale Ale or iPhone App, you decide!