Basic OS functionality? There's an app for that.

I was playing around with the sketchbook app, and made a bunny.

[pause for chorus of applause]

Technically I made two bunnies after the first one disappeared when the iPad crashed, but-- Ok. She wanted me to send her the file, so instead of setting up one of my e-mail accounts on the iPad, I just logged into gmail from Safari. I composed an e-mail and clicked to add the attachment... Except I couldn't browse the file system... Weird. Well I guess they want me to use their e-mail tool instead of doing it my way. Figures. Instead, I browsed to imageshack to do the upload so I could just send her the link... Except I couldn't browse the filesystem... Huh. Could it be that safari truly doesn't have an internet browser based file system browser? I think a moment, and remember Flickr. Flickr! Flickr is all Web Two-point-oh-y so it has to have functionality on the super hip Apple OS. I browse to Flickr, and I can't do any uploads. This was after I browsed the Flickr pool of other people's sketches they did on their iPads. How were those people uploading? Oh! There's got to be an app for it. Then I realized why there had to be an app for it.

The reason there are so many apps for doing tiny, menial tasks such as uploading files, using social networking sites, and almost any site with ajax involved, was because the OS couldn't do any of those things.

But why would they make an OS that had that basic functionality built in, when they could remove it, and sell an app for $0.99 that adds the functionality they clearly went out of their way to disable?

Amazing. I am both disgusted and impressed.