Waiting for Lightroom on the iPad...

Interesting almost-rant but meaty dissertation from a developer on Apple's sandbox, the iOS SDK and developing a significant DAM app:

http://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=5603.0

Walker's points are well-taken (although I'd argue that Omni wouldn't appreciate Graffle and Focus on the iPad being characterized as "an 'app' being something less than an 'application' of course"), and a helluva lot more cogent than the "no Flash == no other Adobe apps on the iPad" FUD.

That said, I remain hopeful that we'll see something for a few reasons:

• Remember only web apps for iPhone? No access at all to media? IOS continues to mature (as do the governors at Apple, I suspect). Capabilities and access will increase over time, sort of a Moore's corollary. Waiting for access to metadata shouldn't be as painful as waiting for Godot.
• I've never thought a full-blown Lightroom app would be that useful - photo editing with only touch controls on a smallish display isn't my kind of experience. That said, I'd love to have the DAM capabilities of Lightroom for sorting/tagging/organizing, and leave the editing for the studio.
• If #2 is the end product, one only needs to work off of JPEG previews rather than the full-meal RAW data. Should mitigate memory concerns somewhat (even though I have Lightroom set to use full-res previews, I wouldn't do that on the iPad anyway).

On a tangent, I find the perceived obstacles to ingesting photos interesting as well. More and more prosumer and even pro cameras are supporting SD directly as opposed to CF (some have slots for both), and from what I've experienced, the speed of some of the SD card flavors stacks up pretty well against CF. Apple, touting the MBP as a "photographer's workhorse", provides SD but not CF - and they're never wrong, are they? :)