Patrick Collison:
I mean when I first went to submit it to the store I had done quite a bit of work getting it down to just marginally under two gigabytes, because two gigabytes was Apple’s stated limit. But it actually turned out that Apple’s infrastructure and their software was not able to handle two gigabyte applications or anything even close to it. I don’t know, but a couple hundred megabytes was the cutoff. That three-month approval process included them having to fix bugs and me having to change how the application worked and all the rest just so I could physically get it into the store. And so the way it actually works today is the application itself is extremely small. I mean just a couple of hundred K. And then you download the application. And then when you first run it, it includes its own sort of embedded downloader thing that allows you to download the Wikipedia from within the application. And it allows you to pause and resume the download and all of the rest. So this actually ended up being the only reliable way of making the download work.
Lukas Mathis:
Quasimodes require the user to do several things at the same time, such as holding down the Shift key while typing. Modes, on the other hand, allow users to do things sequentially - hit Caps Lock, type, hit Caps Lock again. Sequential actions, especially if guided well, are often easier to execute than parallel actions.
